


Wicked Things

by siren_songs



Series: Geraskier Works [7]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Apocalypse, BAMF Jaskier | Dandelion, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fae & Fairies, Fae Geralt, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, I take canon out back and beat it with a stick until it stops twitching, Identity Issues, Jaskier | Dandelion-centric, Jaskier's horrible lack of self-preservation, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Monsters, Slow Burn, Survival, this time Jaskier's the horse girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 101,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26407309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siren_songs/pseuds/siren_songs
Summary: This is the story of how Jaskier helps to save the world.Jaskier is twenty when a rift opens and an army of Fae pour through it. Bloodthirsty and mindless, they sweep across the Continent, devastating human settlements and pushing them into smaller and smaller communities. Jaskier finds himself trapped in Lettenhove, having to deal with his father's gradual decline into madness and protecting his family and his village from the threats outside their walls. He meets a Faerie, trapped in a Faerie Ring; the rest, as they say, is history.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion & Jaskier | Dandelion's Father, Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: Geraskier Works [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618192
Comments: 94
Kudos: 297
Collections: Geralt x Jaskier, Witcher Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This monster was written for The Witcher Big Bang 2020. I've been working on this for about five months, and I'm so pleased it's finally finished so I can start writing other things! Huge thanks to my beta Hannah, who refuses to get a tumblr and doesn't wish for me to link her twitter, and without whom this fic would literally not have been finished on time. [So much thanks also to my artist, SDeeyS](https://sdeeys.tumblr.com/), words cannot say how appreciative I am of you picking this up and making such stunning work! Everyone go send them love!
> 
> [Here's the full artwork](https://hostr.co/iXKbSVofsf4D)

As with any well-bred Redanian child, horses—fast horses—are in Julian’s blood. From the tender age of three years old, he has had hours of his days devoted to working in the saddle, learning the hearts and the souls of the animals between his legs—running from his growing pile of responsibilities, before their burden can afflict him further.

Without a twinge of regret, Julian plants his foot into the stirrup, braces his hand on the pommel, and bounces up into the saddle, gathering the reins in his hands and automatically checking the filly from shooting forward by closing his legs around her sides. She jostles beneath him, restless and hot, but stays in place.

He’s supposed to be attending his father in the manor, standing quiet and regal and obedient by Juliusz’ side while the viscount entertains his peers, all while maintaining the image of becoming a doting family man in his retirement. He’s supposed to be smartly dressed in velvet and silk and lovely embroidery, polished and shined and scented. He’s supposed to be noble and courteous and charming: the perfect Lettenhove heir.

Instead, Julian is clad in worn breeches and his riding jacket, sheepskin gloves and weathered boots, and the soft smell of hay and leather and horseshit. He’s riding a fresh, eager filly out into the sticks, her snorts like dragon’s breath in the crisp morning air, her shoes beating out a brisk rhythm on the hard-packed ground. Julian is cheerful and irreverent and disrespectful, and, above all else, cannot stand the fetters that seem to be synonymous with the title of ‘Viscount de Lettenhove’.

The sun is high overhead by the time Julian returns, both he and the filly sweating and breathing hard, the demons temporarily banished from his mind by a hard gallop on a fast horse, though with every furlong they close between the heart of the hinterlands and the manor house he can feel the bastards closing in, waiting for him.

His mother, too, is waiting for him.

It is such a peculiar sight, seeing his mother out of her room, standing in the sunshine, wearing a quiet smile that somehow makes her face more shadowed rather than brighter, that Julian reins the filly to a halt and then curses himself when she tosses her head, disgruntled at the hard-handedness. Hard hands make hard mouths, his trainer took great pains to unequivocally get into his head, and he won’t be responsible for ruining this filly.

His mother takes the filly in hand when Julian draws near, holding the reins beneath the mare’s chin with a practised hand while Julian dismounts and runs the stirrups up the leathers. He hears her whispering to the mare; she had noticed his lapse, too, and seems to be apologising to the filly for it, scratching the mare’s whiskers.

“Your father is not impressed.” She turns to him, expression almost stern but for the twitching of a suppressed smile at the corners of her mouth.

Perish the fucking thought, he thinks to himself, but doesn’t voice it. Instead, he says, “my father is never impressed,” rolling his eyes and taking the reins from her to lead the filly into the stables. The sweat hasn’t yet dried on her skin, and still she dances at the end of the reins, wanting to run.

“Now, that’s not fair,” his mother frowns, following him, and she waits until the three of them are in the filly’s stable before closing the door behind them. She makes short work of undoing the girth and sliding the saddle from the mare’s back, pulling a face at the sweaty saddle pad. She cuts a glance at him and arches a brow. “You can’t expect him to be cognizant enough to be impressed while he’s sleeping.”

Julian barks a surprised laugh, shaking his head. He misses this, misses his mother when she’s off in that far-off land of hers. The filly stamps her foot, impatient for her slice of hay, so he quickly finishes rubbing her down before slinging the bridle over his shoulder and taking the saddle from his mother, gesturing with a tilt of his head for her to open the stable door and let them out.

They walk in silence down to the tack room, and then Julian’s mother says, “I’m going to miss you, while you’re at Oxenfurt.”

Julian smiles a bit sadly. She won’t, but she doesn’t need to know that. “I’ll write to you, every week.” And he will—she probably won’t get to read every letter; if she’s having a bad day then they won’t risk upsetting her further—if only to assuage the creeping feelings of guilt, that he’s leaving her here in the clutches of his father, while he gets to run and run and run.

She hums. “You’ll like it there,” she says, staring down at her hands as if she’s never seen the saddle soap she is holding before. Which, she might not have (they go through the stuff almost faster than they can replace it), but Julian suspects she’s beginning to float away. “It will be good for you—a bit of independency.”

Julian’s mother has never been independent a day in her life. He’s not sure if that—if freedom—was something she wanted, when she was young, before she met and married his father. Before she had four children, four creatures for whom she was responsible for and could not abandon. Before she was fractured, somewhere deep and important—somewhere in her heart—and never quite recovered; if she wanted something for herself, that couldn’t be attributed to being the daughter of a wealthy merchant or the wife of a viscount. He hopes not. She’s had so much of her life taken from her—having real, proper dreams never come to fruition is something that he could not stand, for himself or her, and so he hopes she would have been happy with the life she has now.

“That’s the hope,” he murmurs, mostly to himself as Joanna sets down her rag and stares at the saddle, face splitting into a wide and somewhat dreamy smile. He can’t help but smile himself—it’s rare to see such unadulterated bliss on somebody’s face, even if it is a product of their own rebelling mind.

He finishes wiping the tack down himself, before carefully locking everything away. The filly is banging on the door when he reaches her with an armful of hay, and his mother is frozen to the spot when he returns to her, thankfully not having wandered off or succumbed to some internal struggle and landed rather unceremoniously on the floor.

Carefully he takes her by the elbow; patiently he leads her out of the barn, into the sunshine, towards the manor.

“Very sorry, milord—she managed to give us the slip, sir,” one of his mother’s nurses—the young, ruddy one, his mind helpfully supplies, without even a syllable of a name—is nearly frantic with worry when she catches them, intercepting their progress and smoothly displacing Julian’s position at his mother’s elbow. “I’ll just get her settled.”

Julian knows when he has been beaten, the pretty young nurse (Irena? Izabela?) already steering Joanna into the shade, following the line of trees up to the manor rather than walking directly across the perfectly manicured lawn. He tracks their progress, before shaking his head and turning away.

Despite the fact that he’d used the servant’s side entrance, his father finds Julian filching from the kitchens barely half a minute after he’d quietly closed the heavy ash doors behind him. He looks, amazingly, even more severe than he usually does.

“Julian,” his father begins, voice sharp enough to cut stone, and Julian pauses in his act of buttering a thick slice of bread. He sets it down. Carefully he makes sure the knife doesn’t clink where he sets it against the butter dish.

“Father,” he says quietly—placatingly. He’s so close to leaving; he needs only to hold out for a few weeks more, and then he’s gone. Free. Off to Oxenfurt, and a far brighter future than he ever hoped he might achieve.

“Your absence was noted this morning,” Juliusz continues, and—gods, Julian fucking hates these word games. Hates having to parse the hidden meanings, secreted away neatly beneath the words being actually spoken aloud. He’s good at it—languages are not particularly a hardship for him; the right words have always leapt to his mind without much encouragement—but good gods does he fucking hate it.

“I’m sure,” he replies evenly, picking up his bread and continuing to slather butter over the one side. “Such a shame,” he can’t help but add, in case his father had missed the part where he doesn’t want to play.

Juliusz stiffens, and Julian braces himself; plants his feet, squares his shoulders, tightens his jaw. Their altercation will not be physical, oh, no—it never is. Juliusz gave up on having his edicts beaten into his son years ago, now. These days, he goes directly for the throat: tearing into his skin with serrated words, dripping with venom. Julian’s proficiency with words had to come from somewhere, after all.

His father clears his throat, and then says, very deliberately, “have you decided what you will bring to Oxenfurt?”

Julian’s fingers trace the handle of the butter knife as he sets it aside, thinking hard. Is this how his father will hurt him? Threatening his escape?

It doesn’t make any sense. Juliusz wants him to be gone as much as Julian wants to be gone. There’s no benefit to this—it isn’t his father’s style. Cautiously, Julian takes a bite of his bread and turns, leaning up against the table, eyeing his father warily.

“Nearly,” he replies, deciding to play along. “I’m leaving many of my—my court clothes here—” he winces somewhat at the slip, remembering only at the last moment that ‘stupid fucking costumes’ will probably lose the small ray of goodwill that his father is apparently deigning to show. “—So I’m having to arrange to have other outfits either repaired, re-tailored, or replaced entirely.”

Perhaps his mother was particularly lucid this morning, before she came to catch him at the end of his ride, and spoke to his father. It warms him somewhat, to think of somebody else defending him.

His father gives him a short, sharp bow, and twists his mouth in a grimace. Julian patiently waits for him to find the right words for whatever it is he is struggling to say. Ever the diplomat, his mind supplies, and this whole business is making him just feel—tired.

“Your name,” Juliusz finally settles upon, licking his lips—it’s a habit for which Julian has never parsed the root of; not quite nerves (Julian challenges anybody to find a situation in which the Viscount could be nervous, ex-cavalry man that he is, a general in Redania’s army), but not quite anything else, either. It is, more than anything, a sign that he is thinking, and Julian doesn’t know why nobody has ever pointed out this tell to him. He certainly won’t, as it is very useful information to have, but somebody must have mentioned it to him and he can’t think why Juliusz has never addressed it.

He licks his lips again, and then says, “you have to change it.”

And that’s… okay, it isn’t unexpected; Julian has known ever since he first decided he would not become what his father wanted him to be, that he would be challenged to give up his family name. He just hadn’t expected it to be so soon. He’d imagined he would have until he reached the age of majority, at least: eighteen years old, an adult in every particular. Apparently not.

His face must give away more than he intended, because Juliusz’ face suddenly hardens, his features darkening and tightening nearly imperceptibly. He is the picture of rolling storm clouds, black and vicious and crackling with fury.

“You chose this,” Juliusz says tightly, a splintering crash of lightning. Julian flinches, then silently swears viciously at himself. “You cannot pick and choose what parts of this family you may benefit from.”

That wasn’t why Julian had paused, at all, but to backtrack now would be to fall further in his father’s esteem. He has made a mistake and now he must live with the consequences, because to admit to such a thing would be to bare his throat to a wolf, inviting him to feast. Any weakness, even just a momentary lapse of attention, of control, is not to be acknowledged.

So Julian gives his brightest, nastiest smile, brushes the crumbs from his hands, and dares to look his father directly in the eye as arrogantly as he can manage. He knows that the approval he sees simmering there is not a figment of his imagination. Julian may never be Viscount, but by the gods he has his father’s quick temper and is as much a wordsmith as Juliusz ever was. He lifts his chin. “This family is poison,” he breathes, his father’s face horribly impassive but for the cruel gleam of pride that Julian rails against with every bit of himself. “I wouldn’t have any part of it for all the gold on the fucking Continent.”

Juliusz’ nostrils flare, and for a brief, terrifying moment, Julian is afraid of his father. Truly afraid. He never wants to see Juliusz with that expression on his face ever again. Thankfully, thankfully, the man backs away and cuts a very deliberate retreat, years of military training stiffening his spine, leaving Julian alone and somewhat trembling.

* * *

The next few weeks pass agonisingly slowly in a torrent of action.

It is… exhausting, to say the least.

His workload seems to grow, rather than diminish, with each passing day. It is with much disgruntlement that Julian realises that, actually, he does a lot for his father and the Lettenhove estate; it feels as though he has lost, somehow, although to his knowledge there has never been a competition for him to lose.

There are the horses to find new riders and trainers for, and breeding lines to consolidate with the other studs, and two colts he ought to break before he leaves. He has his clothes to have mended and tailored and broken down into the raw materials, to be stitched again into something new. His swords need oiling and whetting—not that he has decided he is going to bring them, mind, but that is no reason to let them go to ruin. There is all sorts of paperwork to be arranged, and he spends much of his summer indoors, buried under a pile of scrolls and ledgers and pamphlets meant to prepare him for his classes in the autumn, to sort his lodgings for the next four years, for the role as trainer he will fill in Oxenfurt’s stables so he might afford food and other essentials.

Oxenfurt, in lieu of charging its students tuition, gets its funds from Redania’s government and from a slew of charity functions it hosts throughout the year. As a staple of Redanian culture, it brings tourists and foreign nationals by the thousand, stimulating the economy enough that Redania can afford the cost of upkeep and salary for all of its workers.

The student body is not charged for their teaching, but they do have to pay for room and board, some course materials, some spending money. Mostly they get it from their parents—yet his father has made it clear that Julian isn’t entitled to a single oren; honestly, Julian is happier for it. A clean break is far easier to bear than one that lingers.

His mother does not particularly seem to understand what is happening. She knows, on some fundamental level, that Julian is going away to university—when he catches her in a lucid moment she can talk his ear off about the history of Oxenfurt, of famous alumni, of how much he will enjoy himself. Most of the time, however, she views the bustle around the estate with a sort of bemusement, and they do not make any great efforts to remind her that she is about to lose her son—it will only upset her, of course, and she will only forget it again anyway.

Julian, really, is glad for her; if she doesn’t remember that he is gone, then his absence can’t hurt her. As for him… he has always imagined that he is going to lose her, and sooner rather than later: at least like this, he knows that she is alive still, and content.

His brother, Marek, two years his junior and the most serious twelve-year-old Julian has ever met, earmarked as their father’s heir, loves him dearly even though he doesn’t understand why Julian has to leave.

“I’m like a goat in a herd of sheep,” he says slowly, tilting the bottle and watching the beer through unfocused, curious eyes. Marek, beside him, lets his head slide onto Julian’s shoulders, a frown marring his face.

“Are you calling me a sheep?” he squints up at his brother, and Julian frowns himself, wondering if he had.

“Not—in a bad way,” he tries, but Marek has already put a hand on his knee and pushed himself away, disgruntled.

“Not a fuckin’ sheep,” he grumbles. “How can being called a sheep ever be construed as good, hm—”

“Okay, I’m a lynx in a pack of wolves,” Julian huffs, going for a different metaphor. This draws Marek up short as he considers the ramifications of this.

“A pack of wolves would tear a lynx apart,” he says, with all the confidence of a drunk twelve year old. “Fuckin’ cat wouldn’t stand a chance.”

This suits Julian’s purposes, so he says, “exactly,” and Marek punches him on the shoulder and snags the bottle from his hand, tipping back the last dregs into his mouth.

“You’re not being torn apart,” Marek tells him, absolutely certain, and Julian half-believes him himself. “You’re the best of all of us.”

This is too much emotion for Julian to parse when he’s fourteen years old and beer-drunk, so he cuts a sharp grin at his brother and says, “better’n you, damnit, how many horses have you fallen off this week—?” which prompts his brother to drop the empty bottle and tackle Julian to the ground, and both of them are laughing, breathless, and the conversation is forgotten.

His sister Gabriela, one year his senior and everything a viscount’s daughter ought to be, is equal parts disapproving and amused. “Trust you to make a fuss, Julian,” she ruffles his hair, and laughs at his sour expression.

“Be happy,” she whispered to him, when they hugged goodbye, and Julian wondered how he could ever not be, when he was leaving the source of all his misery behind him.

Hanna, four years younger than he—the youngest of their pack, just ten years old—is positively delighted for him. She hugs him tightly, pressing her face into his neck, and lets out a deep, shuddering breath. It is the kind of sigh that takes you by surprise, as you suddenly release all the tension you hadn’t realised you had been holding, and before he knows it she’s gasping and sobbing against his side, and his arms are tight around her as he does his best to fold her into him.

“It’s okay,” he breathes into her hair. “Everything is going to be okay.” And it will.

After all, he doesn’t imagine that it can possibly get worse.

* * *

Oxenfurt is—

It’s—

Julian doesn’t make a habit of being speechless, but by the gods, this place almost does it.

History seeps from the walls.

Lettenhove is old, yes, but its provenance has largely been forgotten, and those responsible for the strange manner of its building—the doors, all lined in iron, the heavier fortifications on all of the east-facing windows, the runes carved into every threshold and above every fireplace—have all been forgotten, consigned to history and left there.

Oxenfurt, though. The air is steeped in opportunity and in a hunger for knowledge, for freedom; Julian watches a handful of students urge on another, who is halfway up the side of one of the buildings and is having what seems to be a rather passionate exchange with somebody older, more official-looking, who is leaning out of a window next to them. Idly, Julian marks their progress, as they apparently finish their conversation and scale the rest of the building, eliciting a roar of approval and applause from those waiting below.

He wonders how they are going to get down. But perhaps that hadn’t been the point.

The noise draws some attention, but nobody goes to berate them for it. Nobody even seems particularly surprised.

It is so far from what Julian is used to, distinguished from Lettenhove’s policy of ‘peaceful country estate, and by the gods, we’re going to keep it that way’, that it takes several repetitions of his name for him to notice and look back to his guide.

She is smiling at him in a way that suggests that she’s used to this—used to dealing with attention that is divided as such. He blinks at her, thinking furiously back, trying to remember what she just said.

“I asked what you thought of this place.” She grins at him, and it takes him a moment to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth so he can reply.

“It’s—” he casts another glance around, “—something else.” It’s inadequate, but he’s not sure he’d have the words even if he were given a week to think on it. Something about this place seems to elude being quantified.

His guide, thankfully, takes this with good cheer. “Oh, definitely,” she agrees. “I’ve been here two years, now, and—” She casts out a hand, casually encapsulating the surrounding campus, not finishing her sentence but not really needing to. Julian can only nod. He’s looking at her now, and he hadn’t really noticed before but--but there’s something to the way she holds herself, so confidently; there’s something to the spark in her eyes and the tilt of her smile, and maybe it’s because Lettenhove had been stifling and oppressive when it came to matters like this, but he finds himself looking at her and considering.

His guide—Zofia, he suddenly remembers—is studying the sundial across the ground from them. She squints, bites her lips, then turns to him before he can school his expression back to something neutral.

“Right,” she says, almost sceptically. She knows exactly what he’s thinking, and… doesn’t look impressed. He can’t blame her.

“…Yeah,” he replies, stupidly.

Zofia clears her throat. Gamely she changes the subject, and beckons him, beginning to stride back toward one of the larger, main buildings. “The bells are about to ring; I’m to take you to the Chancellor.”

* * *

The Chancellor is tall and broad and looks, to him, to be more suited to a battlefield, sat astride a huge destrier, shouting orders to his soldiers, than sat behind his humble desk, piled haphazardly with sheets and scrolls and with a splatter of ink above his left eyebrow. Like a wolf masquerading as a lapdog. Or a wyvern sunning itself in a children’s playground.

Julian feels his heart rate picking up and hopes against hope that he isn’t blushing.

Two in one day, Julian thinks sourly to himself, his heart rate beginning to pick up the longer he looks at this man. This had better not be the start of a trend, if I’m to get any work done here.

“So,” the Chancellor begins, drawing him from his reverie. “Julian.”

“No,” he blurts, then shuts his mouth with an audible click. There is a time and a place for obstinacy, and this isn’t it, he berates himself, as the Chancellor’s brows shoot up, crinkling the ink splatter and causing Julian’s mouth to dry. So sue him for the reaction; it’s endearing.

The Chancellor must be twice his age, or more. And he’s--yes, Jaskier is well aware that he is still a child and that this man is very much off the table for him, but he’s got eyes, hasn’t he, and there’s nothing wrong with just looking.

“No?” the Chancellor repeats, confused, and Jaskier casts about for an adequate explanation.

“It’s… Jaskier,” he says, slowly, and then explains, “—my name, it’s Jaskier,” when the Chancellor still looks perplexed. “My father demanded I change it,” he continues with a shrug.

The Chancellor’s expression clears, though his brows furrow. “…All of it?” he questions, after a few moments, his voice hesitant now where it hadn’t been before.

No, but you don’t need to know that, Jaskier thinks almost viciously, furious at himself suddenly for having landed himself in this mess, but he’s here now and he’s going to keep shovelling until he’s dug his way out of it. His roiling emotions must be clear on his face, because the Chancellor—who has been studying him intently all this time—looks appeased, suddenly.

“You don’t need to explain,” he says, tone gentle, face schooled into impassive neutrality, and Julian—Jaskier—gives a short, sharp nod, as though he’s pained by the memory of having his identity stripped from him rather than horribly embarrassed about the situation he has landed himself in.

The Chancellor nods back, looks down at the file in front of him, and scratches something out before writing something in its place with a decisiveness that makes Julian—Jaskier—wonder about this man’s own history.

“So, Jaskier,” he addresses him without looking up. Which is fine, because a weight has just lifted off of Jaskier’s chest and something of what he feels must be showing on his face.

He hadn’t expected a mere name change to untether him so, but it has; he is. Untethered.

Years and years of having his own name spit at him like a disease have been soothed and tempered and washed away in the last few minutes. His new name is a balm he hadn’t known he’d needed.

He’s free.

* * *

Zofia does her level best to adopt him into her group of friends. She accepts his change of name without even batting an eye—apparently, new beginnings are easier to come by than most new students usually imagine, and so, when presented with the opportunity, they seize the chance to re-forge themselves into somebody that they can be proud of, and they do it gleefully.

“You’re working in the stables, then?” one of the men (as much as a fifteen year old an be considered a man), Dawid, asks.

Jaskier tips the bottle back and takes another pull. The ale here is not so fine as that which they stock in Lettenhove; it’s the most delicious thing he has ever tasted. “Yeah,” he replies, after a thoughtful pause. “Wasn’t sure what else I could do.”

“You’ll be fine,” Oliwia shoots him a wink and a grin. She’s seventeen, bare months away from graduating, and the oldest of the group. “Everyone finds their place. Might take time, mind, but you’ll get there.”

The words rattle in his mind. Zofia sidles up beside him, slings an arm around his shoulders, and passes him a bottle just as he is finishing his other. He accepts it with a wry glance to the side, where she is watching him with no small amount of amusement and an intensity that cannot only be because of the alcohol, and then he slides an arm around her waist.

Hours later, in his bed, his belongings still in boxes and sweat cooling on his skin, she curls against him and whispers, “your name. I like it.”

Jaskier feels a bolt of vindictive pleasure. Churning in the back of his mind had been the secret consideration of what his father might think, how much he would disapprove. Except now—now Jaskier realises that it doesn’t fucking matter because he doesn’t care. And he’ll keep repeating that to himself until it becomes true.

* * *

Jaskier learns, very quickly, that, by virtue of his upbringing, many of his classmates see him as… other. Not that he told them of it, mind; for one, he’d be violating the agreement he had signed, vowing to renounce all claim to the Pankratz family name and the Lettenhove estate, and for another, he learns that hailing from the aristocracy is something of a black mark against one’s name, in Oxenfurt. There are students here whose families have been hurt very badly, previously, by Redania’s ruling families, and thus there is a general bad feeling over the subject.

Oh, several of Jaskier’s friends guess, of course. They’re intelligent, and it takes him a few weeks to perfect playing a wealthy merchant’s son, rather than a Viscount’s former heir. It throws them, a bit, but they soon learn that he hates his pedigree almost more than they do.

“You’re with us now, lovely,” a boy called Alek tells him cheerfully, throwing an arm around his shoulders and drawing him close. “We’ll get you sorted soon enough.”

And they do. Jaskier had hitherto been of the opinion that he had few, if any, personal biases.

He is, of course, wrong.

There are moments when he will make a comment—on some political situation or other, perhaps, or maybe the legal stature of elves, or else the regulation of healers and midwives and the like—and his friends will share a glance (and Jaskier never does learn if they think he can’t see them, or if seeing that expression on their faces is intended to be part of it), and one of them will draw him aside and set the record straight.

He does his best to learn. He feels like one of Lettenhove’s colts, fresh from the tracks with its racing career done with, being re-trained into something more useful to the majority of the Continent rather than the minority who live and breathe racing. He has vice after vice to unlearn and cast aside, bad habits and ill ways of thinking and an entire pedigree of nobles from which he wants to detract himself from.

He throws himself into his schoolwork. The Seven Liberal Arts is a well-rounded and challenging course, and, quite by accident, Jaskier finds himself thriving.

He does well in history and geography and politics—all subjects, of course, in which he has had prior teaching, though he suspects he would do well in them regardless. Mathematics simply doesn’t bear thinking about, though he forces himself to learn it, if only so that nobody can say that he couldn’t.

Art holds little of his attention, so he shifts his focus to music, in which he does far better than he’d imagined he would.

Music… makes sense, for want of a better way of putting it. It makes the world around him make sense. And it’s like lying, almost, which he happens to be very good at. He can say one thing with his words and another with the melody, and then together they both say something else entirely, and it all makes sense to him. Accidentally, he finds himself enjoying it.

He picks up the lute. And the viol. And the fiddle. He learns some harp playing, though it is more to win a bet than because he has a fiery passion for harp playing. He plays the flute, too, though he finds a passion (and above all, a talent) for singing, which he embraces wholeheartedly, and thus he devotes his time to playing instruments that can accompany his singing.

More than anything, Jaskier works on himself. He tries to be kind. Kind, and compassionate, because there was precious little of either of those two attributes when he was growing up, and he’s determined to be better.

He sees his future spread out before him. He imagines himself a—a bard, travelling the Continent, playing taverns and festivals and in courts, before kings, and feels a flutter of excitement for himself, because everything seems to be falling into place, because he hasn’t felt shackled in a good long while and he’s tumbling in freefall, untethered, and it’s good. It’s fantastic.

* * *

He graduates summa cum laude, with the world laid at his feet, and he’s so close to complete and utter autonomy from his past that he can taste it.

Except, of course, there are two more legal documents that he has to sign, now that he’s eighteen and able to do it for himself, so when he leaves Oxenfurt, the ink still drying on his diploma, he finds himself turning for Lettenhove.


	2. Chapter 2

The road to Lettenhove is long and dusty and provides far too much time for Jaskier to lose himself in his thoughts.

It also, obligingly, provides an insight into what life as a—as a _travelling bard_ might be like. Thus far, Jaskier hasn’t really allowed himself to imagine, to _truly_ imagine, what his future might hold for him once the fetters of the Pankratz family name are finally struck from him, but during the long weeks it takes for him to ride to Lettenhove he manages to forget this, sometimes for days at a time, and pretend that this road he walks is endless.

It’s terrifying and exciting and _new_ , and the day Lettenhove comes into view Jaskier feels a vice around his chest, and wonders how he never really noticed that it was there before he left.

Juliusz Stefan Pankratz meets him at the gates.

“Julian,” his father greets, stiff-backed and straight-faced and, oh, how Jaskier hadn’t missed this.

“It’s Jaskier, actually,” he tells him, reining his horse to a halt. The mare is young and excited about the stallion that his father is sat on, but Jaskier has been riding all his life, and barely notices her prancing. His father ignores her, too, in favour of fixing Jaskier with an icy glare and a derisive curl to his lip.

“Jaskier,” Juliusz repeats, his voice a frigid winter morn, iced over and treacherous. “I see.”

That’s it, apparently, because Juliusz turns his horse onto the road that will lead them to the stables and the two men he’d had flanking him, armed to the teeth and equally unimpressed with the proceedings, fall in behind him. Jaskier nudges his mare into a trot, following behind.

“There’s been an illness, down in the village. Dysentery, we’ve been told; we’ve been having to get workers in from further away, and putting them up in the old barn. You’ll be taking charge of the horses while half the stable hands are put to work in the fields.”

“I’m not staying.”

Except, of course, he will be.

Because he’s never really _free_.

* * *

Jaskier is eighteen years and seven months old, fresh from Oxenfurt, drowning in the stilted, cloying heat of his childhood home, where people insist on calling him by a name he hasn’t used in years, and talk to each other with meanings hidden beneath words slipped into conversations like poison into wine.

His mother, always fragile, always teetering along that cliff edge, over which lies a drop from which she could never recover, sickens.

It’s a bad illness. Everybody can see it; the way her shoulders tremble as she hacks up what sounds like a lung and half her throat besides; the tremors in her hands when she tries to grasp a cup to take a sip of water; the wheeled chair she is consigned to, blankets laid across her lap, an attendant to push her about so she won’t strain herself.

It’s a slow death, and for three months Jaskier tells himself every morning that _this_ will be the day that he leaves.

Of course, he never does.

* * *

“I’m pregnant,” his mother tells him, serene, one pale morning as he sits with her under the shade of a great tree not a hundred yards from the house, its branches holding the sky over her head and shielding her from the weak thing that is the sun, filtering through the mists.

It has been six months since he returned from Oxenfurt.

Jaskier’s heart stops dead in his chest, and he has to throw one hand against the tree, bracing himself.

She can’t be.

Logistically, she _can’t_ be.

She catches his gaze—and only the gods know what she saw there to make her laugh so brightly like that—and says, “it was only one time. Last week, after the dancing.”

Oh, hells, the dancing. His mother would walk on her own two feet right into the fiery pits of whatever hell might be out there, if only she could dance again.

She’d _loved_ dancing, apparently; Jaskier doesn’t remember, but he knew that she had been happy and bright and merry once upon a time, and had charmed his father into dancing with her, and it had become something of a tradition.

And, last week, his father had filled her up with all the drugs she was only supposed to take on special occasions, when the pain was too much to bear and she was screaming and writhing in her bed, and he’d taken her in hand and led her on a slow, careful waltz.

It had been a side of Juliusz that Jaskier doesn’t ever remember seeing, and for half a heartbeat he’d imagined he could see what his parents had been like when they were young.

And then the dance had finished and his mother had waned, and his father had carried her off to bed himself, the both of them giggling like newlyweds.

And he’d—they’d—

There are some things that children absolutely, categorically do not _ever_ think about their parents doing, and this is one of them.

And now his mother is _pregnant_.

She’s giving him a sharp look, and he doesn’t even want to know what she has to say—but this is one of the few times he’s seen her lucid in the past few months, and he isn’t willing to give up even a moment of it, even if he’s being berated every other breath. So he bows his head and waits for her to talk.

Her voice is soft when it comes out, and he flinches against it. “I’m keeping the child, Jaskier.”

She was the first one of his family to call him by his chosen name, and he feels hot tears well at the sound of it.

He blinks them back, and shakes his head, denying, even as she talks over him.

“This little one—my little girl, I _know_ it—she’ll be the last thing I can give you all. I know I don’t have much longer. She’ll be the last goodness I can give to the world before—”

She has to stop, then, because Jaskier is on his knees before her chair, clasping her hands in his, bowing his head over her lap. She pets his hair and makes soothing words and he knows, he _knows_ , that nothing anybody can say will change her mind. His mother may be fragile, may spend more time staring dreamily at figments of her own imagination than participating in the world around her, but when she’s made up her mind about something then there’s no changing. And it isn’t as though they can simply wait for her to forget about this; she’s growing a _child_ inside of her. There’s no forgetting that.

Jaskier remembers when Hanna was born. She’d been tiny, and _furious_ , and had taken so much out of their mother that she had been bedridden for _months_ , unable even to hold her own daughter, and everybody had been in agreement: the Lady Pankratz could have no more children, for the sake of her own health.

Well, here she is, health waning by the day, carrying her last child. She’ll die anyway—her doctor had predicted, quietly, to Jaskier and his father, that she had a scarce six months left to live.

If Jaskier knows one thing, it’s that his mother will fight tooth and nail to bring this baby into the world, even if it kills her. And it will kill her.

But for almost the next year… she’ll keep herself alive for this baby.

He clutches her hands in his and cries quietly, because life is wicked and good people suffer while cruelty only grows, like poison in the earth, and he doesn’t know what else he can do.

* * *

Not everybody takes the news as well as he.

He, of course, cleans himself up in mere moments before steadfastly declaring his loyalty to his mother and her decision, and they’d spent the rest of the afternoon discussing baby names and clothes and what the child’s room would look like, and how Jaskier would teach her to read and to ride. They didn’t mention that Joanna Pankratz wouldn’t be there to see it.

His father rages and destroys an entire sitting room’s worth of furniture before he calms down enough to have a conversation with the Viscountess, but by that time she is smiling listlessly into space, and all he can do is hold her close while his sons watch on in horrified fascination.

His sisters are of the mind that their mother should rid herself of the child, and when Jaskier and Marek both display indignation at such a sentiment they whirl on the two of them, claws unsheathed, and demand what _right_ have they to an opinion, when they would never bear a child.

They have a point, Jaskier has to allow, but they also refuse to hear whenever he points out that their mother has _chosen_ this. _They’re just frightened_ , he reminds himself, sitting with his mother and reading to her while she smiles dreamily at him.

The months pass in what feels like a matter of minutes; it seemed only yesterday that Jaskier and his mother had sat beneath that tree, the world a dim consideration beyond the pale mists, and now his mother is heavily pregnant and sallow, her face is sunken and tired, and she still smiles whenever she sees him, even though she doesn’t know who he is.

She recognises his father. She thinks the child they are carrying is their first together, talks of calling the baby _Gabriela_ , and it’s a jolt to hear it every time. Like looking back into the past, if the events of the past were pasted over the sallow skeleton of the future, a sickening facsimile.

Joanna Marta Pankratz dies on a frozen winter morning, and for a breathless, breathless moment, everybody thinks that her baby has died too.

Then the child begins squalling, and is bundled away by half a dozen women dressed in healer’s robes, and Juliusz collapses back into the chair he’d occupied since Joanna had gone into labour, and he puts his head into his hands, and bursts into tears.

It is one year, three months and nine days since Jaskier has returned from Oxenfurt, his future a beautiful vision laid out at his feet.

Right now, the light has bled from the sky; there isn’t a cloud to be seen but the day is overcast regardless. A robin lands on the windowsill and trills to the room; it is just noise, to him. There is no music, no beauty in it. A vase holds flowers, yellow roses, cut from the greenhouses and carefully stripped of their thorns, and placed in his mother’s sickroom to ‘brighten up the place’. They could be weeds, for all that Jaskier is staring sightlessly at them, listless.

Jaskier pulls Marek to him, holding his younger brother close as he weeps into his shoulder, though Jaskier’s own eyes are dry. Gabriela is outside with her husband and with Hanna, and Jaskier can hear their wails from here, though their piercing cries do not cut through his dull senses.

The gods are cruel. He stands, and goes to make arrangements for a funeral.

* * *

It is a scarce three months after that when the gods decide to play another cruel joke on him.

The family move through the house like wraiths. Jaskier has never seen his father so reduced; the man has become a caricature of himself. His skin hangs off him like old clothes, his hands perpetually tremble, and his face is worn and lined with years he has never lived. Jaskier had never thought Juliusz had particularly loved his wife, but he _must_ have done, for her passing to affect him so.

Gabriela visits to care for the baby, and to make sure that all of them are eating and washing and not running the Pankratz fortune into the ground. Considering that Jaskier legally no longer holds the Pankratz name, he is given an awful lot of power over the Pankratz estate and holdings; his father shuts himself in his room, insensate, and his brother is too young to be anything other than distraught over Joanna’s death. Jaskier is young, too, but he reconciled himself to losing his mother when he first left for Oxenfurt—the last year he managed to have with her was time he never expected to get, and so he finds himself grateful for having it, rather than upset for losing her.

Hanna retreats to the stables. She takes up lodging in one of the small buildings they maintain for staff, and they see her once a week at mealtimes, but otherwise she buries her head in her work and does not lift it to look at anybody.

Marek is listless and directionless, and spends too much time attempting to cajole their father into picking himself up and getting back to work.Jaskier doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it will never happen. Anybody looking at Juliusz can tell; the man is lost in his own head, much as his wife had been. Jaskier wonders if, in his daydreams, Joanna is as dreamy and far-away as she was in those last years, or if he sees her as she was when they first met—fiery and lovely and kind.

He supposes it doesn’t matter.

One day, three months after Joanna’s death, begins as ordinarily as any other. This is strange in that for the last three months, all of the days have begun with an extraordinary dreariness that is difficult not to notice, when it is happening, but is very easy to notice when it _doesn’t_ happen, so perhaps Jaskier can be forgiven for not realising straightaway that today is going to be different.

The sky is blue, and the birds are singing, and outside, spring has settled in full force across the grounds. Not to say that the sky hadn’t previously been blue—only that, since his mother’s death, the sky could be blue or green or a stunning shade of purple, and he still would only have seen the same unsaturated shade of grey. The birds hadn’t previously been quiet—he just hadn’t noticed them. Spring hadn’t quietly crept up on the world, falling upon the land in one fell swoop in the dead of night—the shoots had grown and the sheep had lambed and the world was a cacophony of noise as it always was; it had seemed drab and lifeless to him only because _everything_ was drab and lifeless.

Today, however… the sky is a brilliant, brilliant blue, and his head is full of birdsong, and the flowers are a kaleidoscope of colour.

He doesn’t notice the change, however, because he hadn’t realised that the world had been so lifeless to him before. He only realises in hindsight that something in his subconscious must have been screaming at him to sit up and take notice, _something is wrong_ ; all things are crystal clear in hindsight, however, so Jaskier begins that morning with tea and breakfast.

He is depositing his tray and cutlery—he doesn’t like to be a burden on the servants, since his mother passed, and they have had more work caring for the family themselves rather than only looking after the house—in the kitchen when his father manages to collar him.

He is in one of the small lounges at the back of the house, adjacent to the kitchen and always smelling faintly of snuff (a relic of when his father had entertained his gentlemen guests there, while the ladies took tea or wine in the next room, depending on the occasion), and his father lunges for him as though he is a particularly recalcitrant dog, always watching for its master so it might run as soon as they come near; he feels especially so when his father grasps the back of his neck and holds him tight.

“Don’t go outside,” his father says, trembling like a leaf. This is not so strange, these days, except his face is stark white and he holds the expression of a man who has just witnessed childbirth for the first time (gruesome, and scarring, as Jaskier can attest).

Jaskier wriggles out of the hold, and arches a brow at his father with as much dignity as one can manage after just having been _scruffed_ by their father. “Have you been taking your medicine?” he asks, carefully monitoring his tone so as not to seem standoffish. The physician had prescribed Juliusz opiates and some herb tinctures, to be drunk in tea, and the man has been remarkably recalcitrant about it all.

His father nods, nearly feverishly. “Yes, and that potion the mage gave me for—for when my eyes are tricking me,” he hedges, and Jaskier feels ice shoot down his spine and all the hairs on his arms, his neck, stand on end. His father had experienced some mild hallucinations, Jaskier knows, since the passing of his mother—but the regularity and severity had diminished somewhat in the last weeks, and the dusty tray of vials the witch had given them for when his father’s troubles became too difficult to manage had remained just that—dusty.

“You—perhaps you should go and lie down,” Jaskier tells him cautiously. He’ll call the healer up from the village, he thinks, to have another look at his father. A true breakdown has been on the horizon ever since Joanna passed, and Jaskier and Marek have been working hard to have the estates signed properly over to them both before that happens.

“Julian,” his father says, his hands gripping tighter, ignoring entirely what Jaskier just said. “ _Jaskier._ Don’t go outside.”

That’s…

His father has never, _never_ , called him Jaskier. Not once.

Jaskier gives his father a little smile and nods gently. “I won’t,” he lies, wanting to calm the man before he begins having fits on the floor, or something. “You ought to go to bed. I’ll have a servant bring you some food, perhaps some tea to calm you?”

His father seems placated, and nods a little, his hands dropping to his sides where they tremble intermittently. Jaskier spares them a worried look.

He waits until Juliusz has left the room before he winds his way through the next lounge, into the solarium. He can’t help but be a _little_ curious as to why his father doesn’t want him going outside. If there is anything truly there.

…There _is_ something there.

Out on the lawn; a bloodied corpse. Jaskier isn’t sure what animal it is—really, any semblance of a living beast the thing might have had has been stripped away, as surely as the skin and hair and general form of whatever it had been, and it now is just a hunk of meat, oozing blood and juices into the grass, flies buzzing under the heat of the midday sun. He watches in horrified fascination as they swarm together on the body, then disperse, then swarm again on another part; a writhing, buzzing mass of insects, devouring.

He _thinks_ it might have been a horse. It’s certainly large enough. Perhaps it might have been a cow, though the stables are closer and horses are much more capable of escaping their stalls or their paddocks if they so choose. Though, the pure aberration of having _anything_ so gruesome laid neatly on his lawn means that logic does not factor so much into his considerations, now.

He reaches out, and puts a hand on the doorknob, intending—he isn’t sure what he’s intending, but he feels as though he has to do _something_ —and then something flits up the hill, across the grass, and there’s a _thing_ there, leering at him through the glass.

Something deep inside him _roars_ at him to jump back. He doesn’t; he freezes in place, utterly mesmerised.

It looks human, in much the same way that a wolf looks like one of those small dogs that fashionable women lead about on silken leashes that might be scooped up and held in one hand.

It looks human, in the same way one of his racehorses looks like the mules they work in the village, sway-backed and shaggy.

It looks human, except it doesn’t—it looks like a _monster_.

It sports alabaster skin, free from any imperfection, and _glowing_ in the sun. Clawed hands, blackened and serrated at the tips, and painted red, painted in _blood_ , painted in gore that extends all the way up the forearm. Its mouth is full of knives, stretched into a grin, and Jaskier is suddenly reminded of the fact that in most animal species, baring one’s teeth in such a grin is considered a _threat_.

Their eyes are bright and wild and a piercing, haunting yellow, the pupils slitted and very, very thin—focused on him. On its prey. Their ears are tapered, where he can see them peeking through a brilliant fall of green hair, and a tail curls about their legs with a spearhead point on the end. For the life of him he cannot determine if they are male or female.

 _Fae_ , some ancient, buried part of his mind supplies, though he has never seen one. This is a Faerie. They are very rare—supposedly—and only ever show themselves to humans when they are desperate and starving—supposedly.

This Faerie does not look desperate, nor does it look starving.

In fact, it looks as though it has just made a very lovely meal out of one of Jaskier’s horses (or perhaps one of his cows) and is now looking at Jaskier like he’s next on the menu.

Finally, the instincts that seem to be buried inside him (very deeply _indeed)_ rear their heads, and he finds himself stumbling back, heart thudding so rapidly it’s a wonder it hasn’t pounded right out of his chest, and the Faerie grins at him and snaps their teeth and launches forward, smashing through the glass of the solarium in a spray of flying glass shards.

Jaskier turns and bolts. The wooden door into the solarium has never seemed so heavy as when he forces it open now, then turns and bolts it behind him, and the _thud_ of the Faerie throwing itself against the door has him yelping. He’s never made that noise before, and it sounds weak and tremulous even to his own ears.

The Faerie hisses, then screeches, and then _roars_ , and it’s a wonder Jaskier still stands, when that noise liquefies all of his bones in an instant. He stays upright through sheer force of will, when all he wishes to do is curl up into a ball on the floor and sob.

It bangs on the door once more, and Jaskier waits—waits for the door to explode into a storm of wood chips, for the Faerie to come flying through, for the heavy slab of ash wood to come tumbling around him with an enraged Faerie behind it, jaws gaping wide and talons outstretched, ready to turn him into just another piece of meat, steaming in the sun.

The door shudders in its frame, and that scream pierces the air again and causes the panes to rattle in all the windows, and then there’s nothing.

The Faerie doesn’t come for him.

* * *

The solarium had been a recent addition, which is why none of the wards had been baked into its very foundations.

The house is protected against the Fae, it seems. All those little charms—iron, in the thresholds, and strange carvings above the fireplaces, and rock salt hammered into awnings—all of them seem to deter the Fae.

The Pankratz’ watch from the windows as villagers try to flee to the estate where they hear no screaming. They watch as the villagers are hunted. Jaskier and his family watch as men, women, infants, are tackled from behind, sent sprawling to the ground, and devoured.

Some of the villagers make it, and are greeted with open arms and food and shelter, as much as can be spared/

One woman sobs into Jaskier’s chest, the bloody rags of her child’s swaddling clothes still clutched to her breast, the infant itself in the belly of a beast that ate its father and then its sisters, too, and Jaskier feels a quiet rage, and a quiet grief, well up like the rising midday tides. With both of them together they threaten to spill, to drag him down and drown him, to consign him to the same misery that his father is lost to.

He stalks the halls of Lettenhove, checking on families squashed into bedrooms where there is no space on the floor to walk for the bedrolls laid out, the people laid atop them, and he considers his genetics.

Jaskier knows about gene catching, about breeding for desired qualities—doesn’t he do the same thing, with Lettenhove’s racehorses? He knows about sicknesses that pass down from the dam or from the sire, and how they can spoil an entire generation if they are not removed from the bloodline entirely. Clipped away, like deadened leaves from a bush.

Jaskier’s mother had shown no signs of her sickness, her madness, in her youth; it was only later, in Jaskier’s own infancy, that her thoughts began to scatter and melt away into daydreams. When she had already had two squalling babes, and was pregnant with a third, and it was too late to suggest that she might not breed, so as to not pass down her faults.

His mother’s mind had scattered quite to pieces in her later years, and his father seems to be emulating her. He is lost in his grief, insensate--and as their child, there was never a hope for Jaskier, was there? That both of his parents might be lost to illnesses of the mind… it does not bode well for Jaskier’s own sanity, in his twilight years.

It is something he worries about, when the emotions storm inside him without an outlet to relieve him, and he thinks he might be slipping.

He cannot afford to slip, however, so he adjusts his grip on his mind, and forces himself to grow stronger, and to carry on.


	3. Chapter 3

As a whole, the humans adapt to their new reality in much the same way that humans will adapt to any abrupt change that they do not endorse—that is to say, gracelessly.

In those first few weeks, before communications between cities and villages and from court to court become impossible, the survivors at Lettenhove learn that, across the Continent, there are dozens and hundreds and, knowing humanity’s propensity for violence, likely even _thousands_ of attempts to fight back. Humans as a species have an evolutionarily-embedded thirst for revenge, and by the gods, were they going to sate it.

There is, in the back of the mind of any human who was raised amongst other humans, a veritable stockpile of legends and myths and tales about the Fae, stories handed down from elder to youth, told over crackling campfires long before humans ever sailed to the Continent, long before anybody ever thought to put these stories to paper.

They’re told by soothsayers and old women whose intentions, primarily, are to frighten children into behaving. In the wake of the Fae scourge across their land, these same people are now adjured for all the knowledge that they can share.

The humans arm themselves with iron and silver, ash and holly and rowan wood, red berries and salt, daisy chains and four leaf clovers and primroses and marigolds and Klamath weed.

It serves to teach them what works against the Fae, and what doesn’t, because inevitably it is only those with protections that _work_ who return.

The Lettenhove survivors can do nothing but watch as communication and travel and trade all cease, as all those who dare to leave the safety of their communities are killed or lured away to gods-knows-where or simply eaten. Lettenhove is cut off from the world, just as the rest of the world is shattered into hamlets and towns and cities, all cut off from one another.

Lettenhove is lucky in that is can be self-sustaining, in terms of the basics of survival—the village provides the workers, and the manor provides the animals and the fields in which to work.

Life, despite Destiny’s best efforts, goes on.

* * *

After Jaskier’s attack, he scrambles to his feet, chest heaving and a distinct ringing in his ears, and goes to find his brother.

His sisters are embroidering in one of the numerous lounge rooms; he is too wild with terror to spare them more than a glance ascertaining that they are okay, his heart roaring at him to _find his brother_ , because Jaskier can’t do this without them.

“Don’t go outside today,” he warns them; Gabriella looks at him queerly.

“Whyever not?” she asks, her embroidery lowering into her lap as she studies him.

“Monsters,” he says stupidly, still disbelieving himself. “Faeries. _Don’t go outside._ I have—Marek—” half an explanation, and more than he’d intended to say. He leaves them, incredulous, and tears through the house to Marek’s room—and Marek isn’t there, of course, because Jaskier woke late and so his brother is probably—

Outside, with the horses.

Or perhaps meeting with some of the men, down in the village.

Or perhaps he’s gone to stand over their mother’s grave, as he does when he thinks his siblings won’t notice.

Or gone to speak with the farm hands—it’s almost the spring market, where they drive most of their commercial stock to a town several miles away, earning nearly a fifth of their income for the year.

 _Outside_ —and probably eaten, or just disembowelled and left for the flies—

“Jaskier?”

He flinches badly enough that Marek’s hand lands on his shoulder, balancing him. (It was hard, after their mother’s death, to even look at one another, let alone touch; Jaskier doesn’t remember the last time somebody touched him like this.)

“Marek.” Relief chokes his voice, and the word comes out strangled and pained. “There’s—we need—”

“Jaskier,” his brother says firmly, “what’s wrong?”

“Fuckin’ everything,” Jaskier laughs, turning to appraise his brother. “The world’s gone mad. Or maybe I’ve gone mad, but—”

Something hits the window, and both of them jump away from the noise, startling back against the wall of the corridor Marek collared Jaskier in and turning to face the source of the noise.

It’s… well, it’s not human.

“Jaskier,” Marek says, his voice tightly calm in the way that people speak when they’re _this close_ to losing it entirely. “What is that?”

Marek, bless him, never had the benefit of leaving Lettenhove for education, and so his vocabulary is a little more limited than Jaskier’s own.

Jaskier, however, can swear enough for the both of them, and he does so now, bringing out curses he hasn’t used in _months_ so he might more thoroughly encapsulate the utter _fucked-up-ness_ of the situation. Marek shoots him a thoroughly scandalised look, and Jaskier can’t help but appreciate the priorities being displayed here. There might be a demon from the lowest pits of hell knocking at their second-storey window, but god forbid Jaskier forget his _manners_.

The thing screeches, and bangs its fists against the glass, and Jaskier and Marek both snap their attention back to the window. A kind of calm has settled over both of them, fuelled by adrenaline and disbelief and terror, which is why Jaskier’s voice is now perfectly steady.

“It’s a Faerie.” There’s no doubt about that.

It looks like somebody wrapped the skin of a human around the body of a wolf, bending and contorting the bones and the organs into an _approximation_ of a person, if you didn’t mind the gaping, cavernous mouth lined with fangs, or the long, pointed ears flattened back against the thing’s skull, or the furious golden eyes, slitted and piercing. The arms—hands—paws were tipped with talons as long as Jaskier’s own fingers, and he can see even from here that they’re serrated. Muscles shift and ripple under the creature’s skin, which bulges oddly with the motion, as the legs shape and re-shape into ever-more awful contortions.

It’s a nightmare given flesh.

“Faeries aren’t real,” Marek says, his voice as sure as it has ever been. Still terror-calm.

“Well, why don’t you tell it to _that_?” Jaskier rounds on his brother, incredulity strengthening his voice against the pervading fear that has sunk into his bones like a winter’s chill. His head is beginning to buzz, the ringing from earlier giving way to the pounding of his heart, the trembling that he can’t seem to shake off.

 _That_ slams its head against the window, grinning horribly, seemingly not noticing nor minding as the skin across its head splits, smearing blood against the glass.

“Why can’t it get in?”

Jaskier darts his tongue out to wet his lips, mouth dry. “There’s—there was another, downstairs. Smashed through the solarium, but it couldn’t get through the door.”

There’s a beat, and then, “another?” The word is twisted and garbled, sounding as though it had been called through a rusted, winding pipe, strangled by fear in Marek’s throat. It breaks, halfway through, because Marek is still a teenager and his voice is _breaking_ , and it’s an odd thing to note perhaps but it isn’t as though any part of this day has been _normal_ , Jaskier reasons almost hysterically to himself.

“It got one of the horses. Or it might have been a cow. It was just—meat, left out on the ground.”

There’s a distant, faint, but still distinguishable scream.

And then another.

And then more join, a horrible symphony of human terror that roots him to the ground, freezes the blood in his veins, raises every hair that he has and orders him to _run_ , because something is coming and it’s something that wants to _eat him_.

“The village,” Marek says, because of course—of course it’s the village.

The Faerie at the window roars in its frustration, jerking both of them from their terror-induced reveries and sending them sprinting down the hall to the staircase that would take them to the ground floor.

“Can we help them?” Marek gasps out as he runs.

Jaskier shakes his head, because he doesn’t know; if they open the doors, can the monsters get in? If they walk out of the doors, how soon will they die? Will the villagers even be able to get up to the manor, without being eaten? How many monsters are out there, waiting?

* * *

“Faeries are real.” Marek sounds _awful_.

“Faeries are real,” Jaskier agrees, looking over the room full of people that managed to evade the Fae long enough to sprint to the manor.

Jaskier and his brother and two of the servants had lit an enormous fire on the front garden, large enough and smoky enough and hot enough to be seen all the way from the village, to have bodies of animals and people thrown onto it in the best approximation of a funeral pyre they could manage. Jaskier is sporting three huge slashes in his side, courtesy of almost being grabbed by a Faerie, and one of the servants had been snatched from the ground and flown up into the air, where he’d been half-devoured before the rest of his body being unceremoniously tossed to the ground, the Fae unconcerned with finishing its meal when there were more hunts to be had.

It had been _utter carnage_.

At first there had been less than half a dozen; by the end of the day, more than twoscore Faeries were flitting about Lettenhove manor, testing their defences, sinking their claws into the thresholds, and howling with frustration.

The bonfire still burns, the fuel (bodies, Jaskier doesn’t think to himself) eaten away until it is just charcoal, burning white-hot and cracking heartily.

The merry sight is incongruous with what the fuel had been, with the dozens of corpses still littering the ground, with the dead that Jaskier hasn’t gotten around to collecting. Perhaps twenty metres from the blaze, a trio of Fae fight over the innards of a cow, pulling the intestines between them like a pack of dogs at a rope until they tear, blood spurting, the Faeries cackling madly as they slurp down the viscera.

Jaskier turns away from the window, fighting the urge to be sick.

Things only grow worse from there.

* * *

It is two weeks after the initial attack, and all the survivors that can be found, have been found.

“There are fewer than we’d hoped,” Hannah dares to say, running a critical eye over the dazed and disoriented men who have just come stumbling to their door. They’re the last, they say. All others have been accounted for. Anybody else in those woods is a foe, not a friend; they’ve counted their dead, and won’t be tricked by the Faeries dressing up in skins and voices that aren’t theirs, hoping to lure away some humans upon whom they can feast.

“More than there would have been, but for this place,” Jaskier points out, though it’s small consolation, and the words taste bitter in his mouth.

“I wonder what other places have done,” his sister muses, turning to stare out of the window as though through sheer force of _will_ she might be able to see other estates, other farms, other villages. The brief messages they’d managed to send back and forth until only several days ago have finally come to an end, with the disappearance of the last boy willing to brave taking the letters.

Jaskier doesn’t point out that there was nothing anybody _could_ have done. The monsters came, hungry, and furious, and they hunted and played and the humans died screaming. Weapons don’t work against them. Magic doesn’t work against them. Their list of things that _do_ work dwindles, as they send more and more men out to fetch animals and tools and materials, armed with what they could manage from what stores they had, and fewer and fewer men return, their charms and tricks and silver trinkets failing as the Faeries grow bored of playing with their food and set about devouring them instead. 

“I’m sure they found something,” is what he says instead, and Hannah nods and looks relieved.

“Yes—yes, I think so, too.”

* * *

“Children are going missing,” is what an older woman of the village says to him, one day in the second week.

Jaskier doesn’t know her name. He’d made a point, in the beginning, to try and learn them—and then people had kept dying, and he’d stopped making the effort.

Jaskier _does_ know that she’s telling the truth.

There had been a family, a _very lucky_ family, who had all of them managed to sprint for the manor while the Faeries ignored the fleeing humans in favour of the fat prime pork the man raised in his garden. A man, a wife, and their nine children; now a man, and his two eldest children, after the mother had followed her seven youngest into death via the sharp blade of a knife and the grief of a mother. The mother they’d burnt; the children had been taken by the Fae, and of them, nothing remains.

Another family—not so much a family, really, as three orphaned children who’d arrived together and since been stubbornly inseparable. They had all disappeared together, and though they slept in a pile in the middle of one of the largest rooms on the ground floor, surrounded on all sides by a dozen adults, nobody could say where they went, nor when.

They were just _gone_.

The Faeries are stealing their children, through some ancient magic that lets them croon sweet melodies in their ears, despite all the warding and protections on the doors and windows, in the foundations of the manor itself.

The Faeries are stealing their children, and there’s not a single thing that Jaskier can do about it.

* * *

It doesn’t take them long, however, to stand back up and _fight_.

It takes forty men to beat one Faerie back long enough for others to draw runes into the ground, singing the grass with burning sage and planting iron stakes into the ground at intervals regular enough to make the Fae pause, and retreat, and attempt an attack somewhere else.

They lose more often than they win—but they eke out enough land for themselves, ringed with stones bored through with holes, crusted in salt and woven with daisy chains (a powerful enough talisman to keep all but the most determined Faeries out), that they can begin to work the land again.

They build safe routes across the estate, from the manor to the stables, to the fields, to the village.

“Will it hold?” Jaskier asks Nan (nobody knows how old she is, nor if she’s even a grandmother at all—she’s simply _always been there_ , and has been called ‘Nan’ for as long as anybody can remember. Jaskier guesses her age to be approximately two hundred years old, not that he’d ever say it to her face. Hanna thinks her closer to three hundred.)

She turns her toothless smile upon him. “It might,” she says, “or it might not.”

Not _precisely_ the reassurance he’d been fishing for—the Fae like their games, and might just be lulling them into a false sense of security, waiting for them to have put their faith in the barriers before sweeping across them in droves and killing the rest of them.

Jaskier doesn’t know how Nan had survived, nor does he know how she got herself to the manor, crippled by gout as she is. He swallows his frustration and turns away, _praying_ to gods he’s no longer sure he believes in that the magic will work.

* * *

Much of the farmlands are now in Fae territory, along with the crops growing on them.

“Will we starve?” asks Marek, to Jaskier’s right, standing in their father’s study across from the older men of the village with whom they are having this meeting.

Ulryk fixes him with a hard stare. He presents rather an imposing picture: one-eyed; tall; broad from years of toiling in the fields; one arm strapped in a sling and the corresponding shoulder wrapped in bandages enough to give him a lopsided appearance, the result of nearly dying under the talons of a Faerie.

“Not this winter,” Ulryk eventually rasps, his voice that of a man who has smoked a pipe for the last forty years of his life. He’s been one of the elders of the village since he was about twenty-five; apparently, some ancestor on his mother’s side was a soothsayer, thus granting him greater wisdom at a far younger age than most. Jaskier just thinks the man has a wealth of _common sense_ and knows to pay attention to it, but he’s not fussy about the source of his knowledge when it’s going to be instrumental to their survival.

“And next winter?” Jaskier prods.

Ulryk’s expression, incredibly, grows grimmer. “If these monsters are kind enough not to eat us while we work the fields that they’ve left us, then we’ll live. If not…”

Ulryk’s accent is thick and the ‘t’s seem to swallow all the other letters, and Jaskier nods grimly once he’s deciphered what the elder said to him. If not, they’ll die slow deaths, hunger clawing at their bellies and faeries clawing at the doors.

“It’s spring. We’ve got animals and seeds enough to start a new crop. And no choice but to work the fields. What will be, will be.” Ulryk is gruff and matter-of-fact and Jaskier likes him; he’s not had much occasion, in the past, to speak with the villagers, and he’s vaguely regretting it now. How much more of the world could he have known if he’d only stayed here and _listened?_

Jaskier lets Marek steer the rest of the conversation, discussing hunting and farming and fishing with the gathered villagers. There is a map of the estate and its adjoining lands pinned on the wall, adorning the study for as long as Jaskier can remember, only taken down to occasionally be carefully updated. Marek unceremoniously strips it from the wall and splays it across Juliusz’ desk so they might mark where the Fae are focused and where they are absent, and see what lands they have available to them.

* * *

Lettenhove originally had three large stone buildings, built to hold animals—hay lofts and stables and feed rooms, milking parlours and pens meant for sheep shearing, and Faerie-wards engraved into every threshold. Since their conception they’ve been repurposed for the breeding and training of thoroughbreds, but they still boast the facilities to hold the village’s animals. It is into these barns that the villagers herd their animals, when they can, ranging out in groups of men whose numbers slowly dwindle as the Fae pick them off, one by one.

They manage to save cows and horses and sheep, shoving them haphazardly into stables and aisles, pushing chickens up into the haylofts beside nimble-footed goats.

The building stinks of animals and their terror, and at some point the villagers are going to have to relocate them into the fields, but they’re safe. Lettenhove won’t starve this winter.

* * *

It is three weeks after the initial attack, and Julian and his younger sister Hanna mount up, armed with silver and iron daggers and pockets full of iron nails and tokens made from ash wood.

They make the journey to the village unmolested, keeping strictly within the lanes ringed with adder stones, but not undisturbed. The streets are hauntingly deserted, doors locked tight and windows shuttered. They haven’t begun to move the villagers back yet, terrified that it would be a death sentence, and so they ride through a ghost town.

The well is filled with flowers. Jaskier had heard reports of it, from when the village had been first attacked and the Fae had played gleefully in the streets, casting their strange magics, but this is the first time he’s seen it for himself. It’s _awful._ Roses—dozens of roses, blood red—spill from the top of the well, their petals littering the ground like a pool of blood. How the roses are growing, and how far down the well they go, Jaskier doesn’t know and doesn’t _want_ to know.

He spies a bleached-white branch laying amongst the petals, hidden a little from his view by the well itself, and some morbid curiosity almost makes him go to investigate. Hanna catches his eye and shakes her head; she’s seen it, too, though she knows something more about it that he doesn’t.

Upon closer inspection, the branch is bleached _bone_ white. And doesn’t much look like a branch.

Jaskier pales, and rides on.

* * *

Back at the manor, they silently stable the horses, and then Hanna dares to speak.

“It’s like we’re already dead.”

Jaskier cherishes his sister; she’s the most like him out of all of his siblings, having had a hand in breaking most of the horses on the property and who has had her eye on the blacksmith’s daughter since she was fourteen.

“Mm,” Jaskier replies, for lack of anything of substance to say. He can’t contradict her, and he can’t reassure her.

“Perhaps mother had the right of it.”

At this, he pauses. “Mother was very ill,” he says, slowly, “and there was nothing that the healers nor the mages could do for her.”

“If she hadn’t had Zofia, she would have lived several more months at least,” Hanna tells him, her voice without inflection, without accusation. They’d spoken of it, awkwardly—all of Joanna’s children, sitting and talking around the circumstances of her death, how she might have had months left to live had she not had her child. Jaskier himself suspects that Joanna wouldn’t have bothered to fight for those last few months if she weren’t pregnant; he does not share these opinions with his siblings.

“Hannah,” Jaskier says, his voice very quiet and small and serious enough to focus her attention. “Don’t… do it.” He raises his eyes and looks straight at her and she looks back, fearless and determined and a bit scandalised.

“Of course, I won’t,” she tells him bluntly. “Whatever mother had going on with her, I was only saying. It seems madness, that we should persevere, when there is no hope.”

Jaskier smiles wryly. “If we had hope, we wouldn’t need to persevere.”

He watches her swallow this as she leaves him in the barn, heading up to the manor by herself while he stays behind to tend to the horses, rubbing them down and cleaning their tack and leaving them hay.

Ordinarily, there would be a groom or two about to take these chores off his hands, but under the circumstances and with fewer villagers about to work the cows, sheep, and crops, Jaskier had sent his workers off during the day, asking only that a handful of them come in the morning and evenings to assist with feeding and mucking out, perhaps working some of the horses.

Of the thirty head of animals that Lettenhove had maintained before the Fae crawled into the world, furious and starving for blood, they now boast a mere eighteen: six they’d lost to the Fae, and six they had sent to bolster the now-dwindling stock of the village, lost to the Fae and to villagers taking their animals and trying to flee into the woods. They have five broodmares, three stallions, six geldings, and four yearlings, leggy and impatient with being kept indoors.

They’ve not much need for riding horses, now. Not shut into their lands as they are, cut off from everywhere else—no way of travelling to Oxenfurt or Novigrad or Rinde, nor across the border into Temeria or Aedirn, or the other neighbouring countries.

The most frightening part of all of this, that everybody whispers but nobody dares to voice aloud, that has all of them gritting their teeth and darting frightened looks into the blackened forests (even though, supposedly, with the adder stones and curses and protections they’ve strung about themselves, they are safe) is that—the mages, the witchers… they ought to have _done something_.

It’s been three weeks, and neither hide nor hair has been seen of any of them. Aretuza, Ban Ard, every one of the witcher schools: silence, from all, at least to where they are in Lettenhove. Those that were meant to protect them, to whom they have been sending money and supplies and weapons; the mages that had held such power in their courts and the monster-witchers that had been allowed into their settlements—every one of them has abandoned the humans in their time of need.

The betrayal that runs, seething and white-hot, through the hearts and minds of the humans in Lettenhove and its village is a vile, roiling thing, and hard to ignore. For his part, Jaskier tries not to get involved in the debating, the gossiping, the pointless arguing where the bitter survivors of Lettenhove have shouted disputes and manage to entirely agree with one another, yet still come away frustrated and aggrieved.

It’s _exhausting_.

A mage had helped his mother, in the last years of her life, to be more comfortable. She was a lovely witch with yellow hair and kind eyes and a clever tongue—she’d been so genuinely distressed that she couldn’t help the Viscountess, and Jaskier couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her. Magic can fail anybody.

Magic _has_ failed _everybody._

Jaskier has his suspicions—that whatever caused the Faeries to come through in such numbers, and give them such obscene strength in this world, was also what caused the mages and the witchers to seemingly vanish—but he does not voice them. Safer to keep them to himself.

* * *

The Lettenhove survivors settle into a new routine, fighting to _live_ , to acclimate to this new equilibrium.

* * *

Jaskier manages to follow his own rules for an entire year. Considering he’d spent literal years of his life dreaming of the day he’d be free from Lettenhove, it’s a miracle that his sanity has lasted this long. That he hasn’t already tried his luck at leaving the safety of the estate, Faeries be damned.

He’s frustrated, because his siblings don’t seem to be struggling nearly as much as he. Marek takes over the running of the estate as their father’s health continues to decline, coordinating with the village and digging through their histories and ledgers to see if they have any hidden cache of weapons, of food, of scrolls that might contain knowledge that could help them.

Hanna spends her time with the horses, with her blacksmith’s daughter, and seems… content. As content as Jaskier’s ever seen her. Gabriela throws herself into working with the villagers, training with the healer and the midwife: both of them ancient, crinkled things, who dote on Gabriela and her husband.

Zofia, the baby their mother had died to bring into the world, is cared for by an older woman from the village, perhaps ten years older than his mother had been, who’d raised eight children of her own and had been living by herself since the Fae took her husband. She accepts Gabriela’s invitation to stay in the manor with them without hesitation.

Jaskier concentrates on the horses. Caring for twenty-three horses is hard work, even if nearly half of them are mares and foals, requiring little more tending than simply throwing them in the two closest fields to the barns to live amongst the sheep, and keeping an eye on them. It leaves thirteen horses between Jaskier and Hanna and the occasional boy from the village.

“Why would _anyone_ choose to do this for a living?” Hanna says one morning, blowing the hair that has slipped from its queue out of her face and leaning heavily on her pitchfork.

“I used to do this at Oxenfurt,” Jaskier reminisces, wondering what became of the university. Of the friends he’d made there.

“Hmph. Well, at least I know what we’ll be eating first when the food runs out this winter,” Hanna grumbles, eyeing the rest of the straw bed with disdain.

“They’re thoroughbreds, Hanna,” Jaskier reminds her, grunting as he lifts another forkful of clean straw and tosses it at the bank they’re building at the back of the stable. “They’re too scrawny to be worth eating.”

“Their bones—would make—good soup,” Hanna puffs, not to be outdone by her brother and so getting back to her own work.

Jaskier shoots her a look. “You can’t make soup.”

“Well, I’d fuckin’ learn,” she gripes, scraping her fork against the stone floor as she tries to lever it under a truly impressive patch of sodden straw, clumped together and clinging stubbornly to the stone floor.

“You kiss your girlfriend with that mouth?” he teases her, then yelps when he has to jump to dodge the horse piss-saturated straw she sends flying his way.

* * *

The horses are hard work, decent work, and it keeps him strong and tires him out so he can’t do anything stupid. Like running headlong into Faerie-infested woods and promptly being eaten.

* * *

The nanny they had found for Zofia also does some housekeeping, to ‘keep herself busy’ she insists, despite Jaskier and Marek’s protestations; they’d sent many of their staff back to the village along with their families, and now the vast old manor house has two of its wings boarded closed as the Pankratz’ withdraw to the side of the house that is furthest from the woods, and the endless rooms for entertaining on the lower floors are rarely disturbed.

So the house is kept clean, as they all pick up after themselves and the candles are lit and changed and the sweeping and dusting done by a woman used to chasing after eight children, but the fireplaces remain unlit and Jaskier feels the chill as he stalks through the halls, heading for his father’s rooms.

Twice a day, Jaskier or one of his siblings delivers a tray of food to Juliusz’ door and collects the previous meal’s remains; twice a day, they knock and call for him and receive no answer. Jaskier does this only rarely, his siblings perhaps recognising that his relationship with Lord Juliusz had been lukewarm and now is icy. Tonight, however, Marek and Gabriela and Hanna are working and working and wooing, respectively, and so the duty has fallen to him. He is only a little resentful.

“Juliusz?” he calls, placing the breakfast tray down on the floor and collecting the empty tray from the previous night. The cutlery is placed carefully on the plate, the pitcher and cup settled neatly in the corner of the tray. There is not a crumb out of place. Jaskier is seized by the lurid desire to take the tray and toss it from the window, or smash it against the door—or force the door open and seize his father by the shoulders and scream, _what the fuck are you doing?_

He doesn’t.

He calls his father again, not expecting a reply, then turns on his heel with the empty tray in hand and goes to deposit it in the kitchen, where it will be dealt with by one of the few remaining kitchen staff.

* * *

The boys are up from the village today to exercise the horses, and ought to be around more for the next few weeks, at least; they’d asked for the extra work, and Jaskier had been hard-pressed to deny them.

They don’t question him when he takes a freshly-tacked horse from their hands, puts his foot into the stirrup, and bounces lightly into the saddle, trotting out of the barn without a word spoken to either of them.

The gelding is hot beneath him and he has to work to keep it steady; it knows this track, knows that over the next hill is a stretch perfect for galloping, knows that Jaskier will let it flick its heels and stretch out its neck and _run_ , as it rarely gets the chance to.

And they do.

There is nothing else quite like the feeling of sprinting, full-tilt, for hundreds and hundreds of yards, until all the thoughts fall from Jaskier’s head and the reins beneath his fingers are slick with sweat and the hoofbeats fade away into the drumming of distant thunder, and all that is present is the terrible, awesome speed.

They gallop, and Jaskier rises and folds himself over the gelding’s neck, and forgets himself.

It’s everything he needs and is over far too soon, and the gelding fights as he tugs at the reins, so he leans back and sits deep in the saddle and puts his legs on and makes sure not to haul on the gelding’s mouth, and eventually it slows, chewing the bit with a foam-flecked mouth and a coiled tension still roiling beneath its skin, ready to spring into action at the barest hint of the instruction to. Jaskier pats its neck, collects up the reins, and turns them back for home.

* * *

His daily rides work, for a time, to stave off the boredom that threatens to consume him, though after a while they only serve to show him _precisely_ how trapped he is. Before, the boundary between the human territory and the Fae’s territory had been _known_ , yes, and carefully marked—but it had not been so obvious to Jaskier exactly how little space they really have.

It doesn’t take very long at all for Jaskier to crack, and do something stupid.

The day is hot and summery, the air humid in the wake of a late spring rain, and the horse is already damp with sweat and water from the air settling on his coat. The reins are slick beneath his fingers and he knows his grip will only worsen, so Jaskier pauses for a moment to pull his gloves on, the day too warm for them to be comfortable yet not dry enough to go without.

The stallion dances in his hands, eager to be off, the saddlebags filled with lunch and his song book and an oilskin cloak, rustling quietly against his hide, and Jaskier nudges him into a walk, stepping out into the bright sun.

He pushes the stallion into a gallop as soon as the ground clears and the track becomes smooth, the grass springy from the morning’s rain, the heady scent of a recent storm and another on the horizon clearing the fears and frustrations from Jaskier’s mind. His heart thumps out a drumbeat against his ribs and beneath him the hooves are like thunder, thunder, and it’s an intoxicating cocktail of feeling _so, so alive_ that, when he fights the stallion back into a sedate trot and they come to the end of the gallop track, Jaskier turns right where he would normally go left.

It’s a monumentally stupid idea, strolling so nonchalantly up to Faerie territory, but he _needs_ a—a change, a break, _something_ that isn’t the same scenery he’s been seeing for a year, now, and he needs it like he needs air to breathe.

He’s also currently on one of the fastest horses on the Continent; if he has to flee, he’ll never have a better chance of surviving it.

Surely that, if anything, ought to give him some leeway with which to bend the rules.

Unfortunately, it seems that something—Fate, Destiny, (fucking Valdo Marx, whom Jaskier has not thought about at all until very recently, when he was sifting through his papers from Oxenfurt and found a love letter from the villainous, thieving bastard that he’d apparently forgotten to burn)—has it in for him, because of course the very first thing that Jaskier comes across is a Faerie Circle.

They’re a relic, really—little more than a myth, he’d always thought. From before the Fae had invaded, when crossing from their world into the humans’ had been difficult enough that reports of a Faerie only rolled about once a human lifetime, causing untold chaos until they were quickly dispatched by a witcher or even a mage.

A children’s story postulated that the Faerie Rings were made by the Fae themselves, dancing a track into the ground, and that if you crossed inside you were like to be snatched away, back to the land of the Fae. Other tales have it that Faerie Rings are the work of dark sorcery, of evil magicians, who worked Chaos into the land and turned it sour, before waiting for a Faerie to cross into it and trapping it there. Others still say that Rings are built by the Fae to hold those of their own kind who are too wild, too evil, even for their own stomachs. The words _Seelie_ and _Unseelie_ come to mind, though if there are two separate Courts of Fae, one of whom is significantly more evil than the other, Jaskier doesn’t have enough information to with which to say.

Most often, when Jaskier had heard rumours of such things, they’d been explained away as natural occurrences, mere coincidence.

He prays to every god that he can think of that this is the case here.

Even as he thinks this, he knows, in his heart of hearts, that _however_ Faerie Circles came to be, and whatever their true purpose is—this is one.

The Ring is largely made up of mushrooms, bigger than Jaskier has ever seen, and interspersed with great smooth stones that cannot have been anything but purposely placed there. The grass inside the ring is a bluish, fouler shade of green than that which grows outside.

It is beautiful.

It is terrifying.

Even the clearing that they are standing in seems to be brighter, more vibrant, more _alive_ , than the rest of the grounds. The birdsong is sweet and melodic, rather than grating, and the stallion seems to settle in Jaskier’s hands, calming for the first time since they left the stables that morning. Jaskier feels when the horse shifts its weight beneath him, resting one of its back legs.

He looks around. Horses can hear an imaginary predator from a mile off, and Lettenhove’s beasts have developed keen enough senses for Fae that some mornings they alert the presence of the monsters even before the hounds do. Cursing himself as an idiot, Jaskier dismounts.

It’s as good a place as any for Jaskier to sit and try to get some writing done. The danger that screams from the Ring has set his blood aflame; it’s like lightning down his spine; a thunderstorm that roils beneath his skin. He rolls his shoulders, adjusting to the sensation of being _watched_ , before slipping the bridle from the stallion’s head, replacing it with the rope halter he’d brought, and securing him to a nearby tree so he might be free to graze.

Jaskier settles with his back to a tree, notebook in his lap, and begins to write.

At first, it is simply an outpouring of words, and most of it is awful. Since his mother’s passing, he’s written perhaps three lines of his own work, and spent hours upon hours upon hours staring at blank paper and wondering if this was it, if this was the end of his dreams and hopes of making and performing music. (Logically, he knows that the Fae’s occupation of their world is a far greater hindrance than whatever writer’s block Jaskier is suffering; thinking about the Fae worsens his mood considerably, however, so he shoves aside logic in the name of not succumbing _completely_ to hopelessness.)

Now, he fills pages and pages, and it’s like a dam has broken: all the silt and dirt and refuse is swept swiftly away, followed by gallon upon gallon upon _gallon_ of fresh, clear water, crystalline lyrics, pouring with such unbridled enthusiasm that once, Jaskier manages to tear clean through a page with the nib of his quill and is forced to write the whole verse out again, rather crossly.

The words burst from him, all of his frustrations and fears and hopes and dreams pressed into the parchment, and the moment is as cathartic as it is frightening.

He can’t shake the feeling of being watched.


	4. Chapter 4

When his stomach begins to protest, Jaskier realises that his hand is beginning to cramp and his eyes are straining and, when he looks up, finds that the sun has already long reached its zenith and begun the slow march back to the horizon. The stallion and he both flinch when his stomach rumbles again, rather more demandingly, so Jaskier sighs and stands and goes to fetch his lunch from the saddlebags.

It’s mid-afternoon. He hadn’t intended to stay out past midday; it’s possible that people will be looking for him, he muses, as people often do if they cannot find his brother. He’d never wanted the mantle of Viscount of Lettenhove, but he seems to have shouldered it anyway—or at least, half of it.

Perhaps it’s selfish, to run away from it all. If selflessness means driving yourself to insanity and then flinging yourself off of that cliff, embracing oblivion, then Jaskier thinks he doesn’t mind being selfish.

Whatever it is, Jaskier needs to return to the estate before they begin contemplating sending search parties after him. The stallion stamps a foot in disgruntlement when Jaskier approaches him with the bridle, and accepts it with ill grace, but thankfully doesn’t try to throw him when he puts his foot in the stirrup and bounces into the saddle.

Jaskier is reluctant to get home. He’s only human, and he can only go so far, so fast, for so long, before he begins to fray, before he _snaps_. He’s been fraying for a while now—perhaps even before the Fae entered their world, perhaps since the very moment he decided to turn home to Lettenhove after Oxenfurt—and he’s afraid that if something doesn’t give, he’s going to snap.

The return journey is slower, as Jaskier chooses a hillier route to try and burn off all the lush grass the stallion just ate. Three of the horses are out being exercised—and isn’t that a surprise, when nowadays there’s rarely even one other person about to get some work done—so Jaskier untacks and does off the horse himself.

As it happens, somebody _has_ been looking for him, but has only just begun and fortuitously checks the stables just as Jaskier is exchanging his riding boots for his country boots.

“Jaskier,” Marek greets, his tone oddly formal; Jaskier can’t remember when his brother began using his preferred name, as opposed to Julian, but he finds the small token of support warming all the same.

“Marek,” he replies cautiously. His brother’s lips are thinned and the skin around his eyes is drawn taut, and there is an overall cast of displeasure that palls Marek’s face. Something’s wrong.

“We’ve—” there’s a pause, as Marek evidently wrestles with some inner turmoil, before apparently coming to a decision. “I need your help.”

That’s not so unusual; Jaskier is the elder of the two, and attended university, while Marek elected to stay at home and have his tutors come to him. What _is_ unusual is that he looks so pained about it: they have long had it hashed out between them, that Marek is to become the Viscount of the estate and Jaskier will be the heir only until a son is born; he never wanted the responsibility, and doesn’t want it now.

“It’s about father,” Marek presses, and ah. Yes. That is something of a problem.

His thoughts must be prevalent on his face, because Marek looks even more visibly pained about whatever is apparently going on. “I’m sorry, Jaskier, truly,” he says, and he says it so _sincerely_ that Jaskier even feels a little bad about the whole affair. “He’s being… impossible.”

 _When isn’t he?_ He thinks snidely to himself, but doesn’t say it. Marek doesn’t have the longstanding history of animosity between himself and Juliusz that Jaskier can boast; there’s no point in being an ass now when something is obviously wrong. “What’s he doing?” he sighs, already knowing that he’s going to give in and help, if only by virtue of his brother’s truly astonishing powers of persuasion. Were the world still as it ought to be, he’d be unstoppable in court.

“He’s…” Marek gulps, and Jaskier feels his heart skip a beat. _Something’s wrong._ Really _wrong_. “He’s somehow convinced himself that—that little Zofia is a—um. A changeling.”

Oh, fuck.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Jaskier says aloud, and breaks into a sprint.

* * *

The scene at the estate is nothing short of nightmarish.

Zofia is screaming, her cheeks red and blotched, tears streaming as she squirms in her chair, little legs kicking helplessly. Nel, the nanny, is wringing her hands, her chest heaving and her face pale and streaked with tears, though she hasn’t moved forward to help. Frightened out of her wits by the egregious form of his father: tearing at his clothes, at his arms; beating upon the walls; upending furniture. The glass in all the windows is smashed. There is an iron poker lodged in the wall, stuck fast, that shouldn’t be in this room at all as there is no fireplace in here. Jaskier doesn’t like to think what Juliusz had planned to do with it.

“Juliusz,” he says, calmly, with the same ring of authority he uses when a horse is being difficult to manage for no discernible reason other than a vicious and unfortunate streak of mischief.

This violence is senseless. There is no choice but to put a stop to it.

His father wails. He tears at his hair, rakes his doublet with clawed fingers and manages to pull the last few buttons from the fabric. They fall to the ground with a clatter, bouncing with fervour and disappearing under the shattered remains of Zofia’s furniture.

“ _Father_ ,” he commands, his voice cracking out like a whip, and at that the Viscount turns and pins him with a piercing stare. Jaskier holds it calmly, though his insides squirm, feeling as though he is again ten years old and under his father’s scrutiny for some disobedience.

“ _You_ ,” Juliusz hisses, his eyes wild. Feral. He twitches, and grins, and Jaskier knows, in that moment, that this is it. It’s done. His father is a very, very sick man, in need of special care that they likely won’t be able to provide.

“I’m going to need you to calm down, Juliusz,” Jaskier says with every ounce of diplomacy that he can muster; distantly, he hears the door open, and thanks every god that is listening that the perplexed stable hand, only just returned from his own ride when Jaskier had come bursting out of the stable at full sprint, had taken his hurried instructions with all the urgency they demanded and immediately wheeled his horse about and galloped for the village to bring reinforcements.

If they’re lucky, they’ll have strong men: farmers and the blacksmith and what few woodsmiths they have left. Juliusz is somewhat reduced, after these long months of inactivity, but he’d been a terribly strong man, once, and a fine horseman, and a soldier; in such a rage as this it might not be easy to subdue him.

“ _Calm down,”_ Juliusz scoffs. “Calm down! This _boy_ wants me to calm down!” he exclaims to Nel, who whimpers and shoots a teary yet considering look at Zofia, looking very much as though she’s contemplating just booking it out of there, child or no, which—well, she might have to, if a fight breaks out.

“Wants _me_ to calm down! As if those murdering fucking beasts haven’t stolen away my daughter— _my daughter—_ and replaced her with one of their own misbegotten _spawn—_ ” with this, Juliusz turns and kicks at a small table littered with sheets and the wax crayons they’d dug out for Zofia; paper goes flying, and one leg crumples under the onslaught, causing the little table to slump sadly down onto three legs, teetering, before falling forward onto the stump with a muffled _thump_. Jaskier watches the whole thing with a sort of horrified fascination, the sad sight incongruous next to the whirlwind of fury that is his father.

Behind him, Jaskier hears a horrified, “what’s this?” and breathes a sigh of relief.

Juliusz whips around to face the newcomers, his face _purple_ with rage, apparently speechless in his incandescent fury. He bares his teeth in a snarl at Jaskier and Marek and the villagers before whirling upon Zofia, who by now is throwing a fit of truly epic proportions, squalling red-faced in her bed, screaming that she wants it to _stop_ , daddy _stop_. Juliusz stalks towards her, uncaring. Nel jumps forward and Juliusz pins her with a savage snarl and a glare, already reaching for the child—

Jaskier doesn’t even remember moving. One moment he is on one side of the door, flanked by his brother and whichever reinforcements he’d managed to bring, and the next he is on the other, standing between Zofia and his father as his father’s fist comes swinging down.

And the thing is—the thing is: Juliusz has several inches on his son, was a military man in his youth, and remained a horseman his whole life; he knows how to box and use a sword and lance and spear.

And Jaskier has spent the last year and change working in the stables every single day, and at fourteen attended university with students from all manner of beginnings, and so he never learnt to box but he learnt to _scrap_ —he’s a quick enough fighter that he can put a grown man down on his back before his opponent can get his bearings. Not to mention, he was drilling in swordsmanship as a child, and can wield a blade even though he hasn’t done so in years.

But perhaps most importantly: Jaskier has been harbouring a festering resentment for this man since he was ten years old.

And so the fist comes down, and Jaskier ducks beneath it with the same agility he uses to dodge flying hooves and snapping teeth; he rolls his weight and sends his own fist into his father’s solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs and forcing him to double over, putting him in rather a nice position for Jaskier to slam his knee into Juliusz’ face, before swiping his father’s feet from beneath him and sending him crashing to the floor. He looks very frail, lying there, and Jaskier bites back the bitter remembrance that this man has locked himself away for a _year_.

It is a very short, relatively neat fight, and Jaskier takes a moment to savour the fact that he hadn’t tripped himself up or done anything embarrassing, before he turns and whisks Zofia from her bed and deposits her in Nel’s arms. The other men are still standing, mouths gaping, at the door.

* * *

They put Jaskier’s father in one of the wings they had closed off: they bar all the doors to the outside, to the rest of the manor, and weld all the windows closed, and it is as good a prison as they can manage. They move the contents of his study, his solarium, his bedroom, his library, and set him up so that he can be comfortable, and arrange for somebody to come and prepare his meals and clean his linens, and it’s disquieting and uncomfortable and Gabriela and Hanna stay far away from the house for two whole weeks while the changes are being wrought.

They return after a fortnight. The four siblings all share a quiet drink and toast their parent’s memory. They mourn the father they haven’t quite lost yet, but still will never be returned, because the man haunting the locked-up wing is nobody they recognise.

“I’m pregnant,” Gabriela tells them quietly. She and her husband have been married since before their mother passed, but at the time she had wanted to wait before having a child and her husband, besotted, wished only what she wished; then Joanna had died, and in her grief Gabriela hadn’t even considered a child; then the monsters had come crawling into their world, and _nobody_ had considered having children.

Except now Zofia is a year and a half, a terror on two legs, and Hanna is finally beginning to properly court her blacksmith’s daughter, and Marek hasn’t shown an interest in anyone but certainly has half the village mooning after him, and they might not get a better time.

She puts down her un-sipped glass of wine and accepts Hanna’s hug with a laugh; Marek and Jaskier both offer younger-brother hugs and pretend that their hearts aren’t breaking, that they don’t know things will be different now. Their older sister is growing up, growing away, learning to become a healer and creating a family with her husband.

Something of it must show in their faces because she laughs, a bit sadly, and sets about teaching them all a new drinking game some of the older men in the village taught her, that has all of them far too inebriated to be anything but happy for her.

* * *

Life goes on.

Jaskier continues to return to the Faerie Ring; flirting with death is a new past time of his, he realises.

It’s comfortable, in the mad way that an ex-lover you certainly have no business talking to is comfortable. Dangerous, yet familiar. He shouldn’t return, ever, but he does, again and again and again, and he fills songbook after songbook.

He brings his lute with him, strumming melodies that has the forest singing along in a raucous cacophony of birdsong that more or less matches what he is playing, an orchestra fit to carry far across the treetops, with only himself and his horse as audience.

It’s lonely, and freeing, and Jaskier—he wants to share it with somebody, but he knows that if he were to tell someone that he’s regularly disappearing to go and haunt a Faerie Circle with his melodies, then he would be clapped in a wing matching his father’s, given two meals a day and hot water for baths and enough books to not go mad, with bars across the windows.

So he doesn’t tell anyone.

He plays his music and writes his songs, and considers singing his ballads to himself but never actually gets around to it, preferring instead to write down his lyrics and play the melodies unaccompanied. He’ll know when he hits the right combination of words, he’s sure, and until then he doesn’t want to disappoint himself.

* * *

Autumn is hard upon them, with winter knocking at the door: the leaves on the trees have turned to brilliant shades of red and orange and yellow, and the huffs of the stallion between his legs are obvious in the air, trailing from his nostrils like dragonbreath. The air is crisp, and chill, and he is bundled against it, his boots snug against his calves with the thick woollen socks stuffed inside them. They were a gift, from a village girl he’d taught to ride over the summer, and at first he’d tried to refuse them (he has more than enough clothes, after all, when they have so little) but she had insisted. She’d then begun to slyly insinuate that perhaps the little Viscount thought himself too good for work from the likes of her, and that had struck a nerve.

There are deer tracks through the clearing when he reaches it, which is _excellent_ , because deer seem to have been disappearing recently and Lettenhove once had entertained quite a large herd of deer in previous years. He’ll have to keep an eye out for them, and perhaps put hay down when food for them is scarce (and in return, he’ll eat them later).

There’s something else in the clearing, too, though Jaskier doesn’t notice until he’s already sat with his notebook out.

In the Faerie circle, sat perfectly innocently and somehow more insidiously than Jaskier had ever imagined possible, is a box. A case, more precisely; if he is not mistaken, a _lute_ case.

A lute case.

Jaskier packs away his little notebook, slings his lute onto the stallion, and is upon on the creature’s back and out of the clearing before he even registers what it actually was.

 _Any_ aberration is cause for concern, and a perfectly valid reason to run: the idea that something out there has been listening, _watching_ , hearing what he plays, and then _toying_ with him like this, is—

Terrifying. It’s terrifying.

He’s reminded, suddenly, as he loathes to be, of the Faerie he first saw a year and a half ago, that day when they all came through.

Green-haired and white-skinned and yellow-eyed, baring knife-like fangs and talons that could carve his throat out like slicing through butter. That horrible, terrible strength. The bowing of the Rowan door beneath the creature’s rage, keeping it out through sheer will of the divine. Mere luck.

He has learnt, the hard way, not to rely on luck. Luck is fickle. Luck waxes and wanes like the moon. Luck obeys her own rules.

Jaskier pushes the stallion farther, faster, and his heart is in his throat all the long way home, and upon handing the stallion off and unstrapping his luggage he walks to his room with enough desperation that people he comes across avoid catching his eye.

He crawls into bed and pulls the covers over his head and does not emerge until the next morning.

* * *

It takes an entire week before he dares return.

His reasoning is that if the creature had truly wanted to kill him, it would have done so by now. The Faeries of lore had toyed with their human food before killing them; the Faeries of their reality had only so much patience for the chase, the stalking, and derived their satisfaction from the gutting. That isn’t to say that the Faeries don’t play games—only that, Jaskier doesn’t believe this to be one of them.

So, he returns, and the lute case is still there—though no longer in the centre of the circle. No, this time it’s _just_ inside the barrier, and Jaskier considers it for several long moments before deciding to ignore it and instead pulling his own lute from his mare’s saddle, leaving her to graze and settling himself in to compose.

The nights are getting shorter, so he’s chased from his safe-haven earlier than he would like, but he has at least proven to himself that whatever lives here likely _isn’t_ out to get him and also that he’s much more productive out here than he ever is in the manor. He’s written more in this two-hour sitting than he has in the last seven days put together.

It feels reckless to linger here, where the grass grows blue and the forest is so unnervingly alive, especially with the sun low on the horizon. His and the mare’s shadows are thrown across the ground, stretched into impossible proportions, giants both. He considers his own silhouette and sees, terrifyingly, his father’s shadow, from when Juliusz had been larger than life and omniscient; when Jaskier had been a child and his father the greatest person he knew.

It’s strange, how in this adversity, that great man has become so reduced, while Jaskier has… well, perhaps not _flourished_ , but he has done far better than he would have thought.

He turns away from his shadow, focuses on running the stirrups down the leathers and tightening the girth, slipping his fingers between the leather and the mare’s belly to check the fit isn’t too tight. She breathes in as she does so, because she’s an ass, and he slaps her shoulder mock-frustratedly before walking around to her near side and climbing into the saddle. She blows out a snort as he tightens her girth properly, and he turns her head to leave when he feels the back of his neck prickle.

Her ears have flicked back. Listening. She hasn’t spooked yet, though: curious, not frightened.

Feeling like this is the moment in a horror novel when the charismatic, suave young hero comes face to face with the monster for the first time and, depending on the novel, either makes a daring escape or is tragically and gruesomely eaten, Jaskier turns his head to survey the clearing.

There’s nothing. Nothing. Even the strange lute case that he has been doing his best to ignore is only sitting there innocuously.

They’re downwind; if there was anything there, the mare would have noticed and bolted halfway back to Lettenhove by now.

There’s—there’s a flicker of movement, just the slightest rustling of brush, and the mare freezes and Jaskier thanks every hour he’s ever spent atop a thoroughbred, learning the self-control he now utilises to not snatch the reins and drive his heels into the mare’s flanks.

It’s not that he’s not frightened—because he _is,_ oh how utterly terrified he is—it’s more that his curiosity is more pressing than the fear currently lighting his blood aflame, pleading with him in the recesses of his mind to _run, get out of here, just_ go!

He’s been coming to this clearing for almost half a year; if there was something trapped in that Circle, surely it would have tried to eat him by now? Old lore says that the Fae are long-lived, and he supposes that if you’d lived hundreds of years and would live hundreds more, a mere half-year wouldn’t even remotely test your patience, but of the Fae that he’s had personal encounters with he wouldn’t call _patience_ one of their better qualities.

So, he pauses, and the leather grows slick beneath his hands as he sweats, and he waits.

And—there.

Oh, fuck.

A flash of white fur, golden eyes, _watching_ him.

Oh, _fuck_.

He meets those eyes.

Never let it be said that he’s a coward.

 _Fuck, fuck, fuck_.

Time seems to freeze; beneath him, the mare strikes the ground with a back foot, as she would during the heat of summer if a fly was buzzing near, and it seems to take a whole minute for her hindquarter to rise beneath him, and another minute for the strike to land, for her to rebalance, her muscles working, for the muted _thump_ of her hoof on the ground to reverberate through him.

Those eyes are piercing.

He could lose himself in them _so_ easily.

Then they blink, and seem to withdraw, melting away into the foliage, and Jaskier turns and wipes his hands on his breeches before gathering the reins, and then finally, _finally_ , he nudges the mare on, keeping her at a walk.

It goes against everything that his instincts are roaring at him, but he refuses to run. If he runs now, he knows he won’t ever be able to come back—if he admits, now, that he’s afraid, then this will be it for him.

It isn’t until they are far out of the woods, riding along the track that they ordinarily gallop along, high above the sheep fields grazing on the one side and the field laying fallow on the other, before he gives the mare more rein and nudges her into a trot, and then a canter.

She goes willingly enough, apparently unfazed by the creature they’d met in the trees, and that, more than anything, is what convinces Jaskier that he can go back. That he will go back. He raised these animals, trained them, trusts them to carry him and not throw him; they in turn trust him to keep them safe. If he can’t trust them now, trust their instincts to know when something is wrong, then he might as well not trust them at all. And after all the time and effort he’s put into producing them, that would be unacceptable.

Everybody needs something to hold on to; Jaskier needs to believe that all of his work has _meant_ something.

The mare springs into a gallop, joyful and phenomenally fast, throwing a few playful bucks that has him grinning fiercely. The shadows are so heavy on the ground that she lifts her knees, hurdling the invisible barriers, and Jaskier keeps up the pace all the way until the barn is in sight, when he draws her back regretfully into a steady trot, allowing her to catch her breath and cool down.

A groom goes to take her from him when Jaskier returns, but he waves her off, preferring to do the mare off himself. This time he needs to see it through, needs to thank his mount for looking after him today, for being there when he stared into the eyes of a monster and the monster stared back.

The mare doesn’t seem to notice any difference. She chews irreverently at her hay while Jaskier sweats over her, grooming her down and checking her feet and putting on her rug.

The house is dark and silent when he enters again, and he eats a cold dinner of meat and bread in his rooms before falling into bed, exhausted.

He dreams of golden eyes.

* * *

He can’t find the time to return to the clearing for the next few days, busy as he is helping to plan the midwinter festivities—they didn’t celebrate last year, nor did they celebrate midsummer, and they’ve enough ale and wine and meat and cakes to throw a fairly respectable celebration, when the time comes a few weeks from now.

A break from the new reality they are all now living with is also in order, and though it won’t be _precisely_ like those from years past—it’ll be smaller, for one, as obviously there’ll be no visitors from other villagers—it should hopefully be cheerful enough even to shake the gloom that seems to cast a pall over nearly everyone, in these shortened, freezing days, with the threat of the Fae hanging over their heads.

When he does manage to get out again, it’s on the white gelding they broke earlier in the year. Jaskier hasn’t managed to get much out of him yet, leaving his training to the stable hands, and he finds himself presently surprised with how biddable the creature is as he directs him onto the gallop track.

He’s a lovely ride, too. His dam is a mare from the king’s own stables, sent to them as a gift for some anniversary of a great battle his father had been a part of, or something, but she was a beautiful creature and one of the fastest fillies he’s ever sat on. Getting a little long in the tooth, now, and they don’t have too many of her offspring—their provenances meant they fetched a better price at market than they’d make while at home—but Jaskier is glad they’ve kept this gelding, with the powerful, uphill shoulders of his sire that make for an incredible hunter.

It had been almost a shame to geld him, but they had a red foal out of the same match and Juliusz preferred darker coats on his horses, so they gelded the white and kept the red as a stud and now both of them are leggy three year olds, not quite grown into their necks nor their ears and still green as grass.

The gelding is placid and chews on Jaskier’s hair when he dismounts, exchanging the bridle for a halter and tying the horse so he can graze.

This time, Jaskier neglected to bring his lute. His songbook is still firmly in his pocket, as are his quills and ink, but the lute case is conspicuously absent from its ordinary place, hitched to the saddle.

Jaskier turns to inspect the Faerie Ring.

He has an offering of bread and two little jars of honey and milk, and a pot of fresh berries, and Jaskier gingerly, gingerly leaves them just inside the Circle, snatching up the strange lute case and cradling it against his chest as he jumps back, expecting at any moment to be snatched away into the jaws of a waiting Faerie.

Nothing happens.

“Bit anticlimactic,” he says aloud.

He takes a moment to calm himself, his racing heart beating furiously in his chest, then goes and situates himself by his customary tree, songbook on the ground beside him and the lute case in his lap.

His breath catches in his throat as he undoes the clasp and flips open the lid: it’s the most beautiful instrument he thinks he’s ever laid eyes on, including the stunning grand old piano at Oxenfurt, forged by elves and gifted to the University when first built.

If he’s not mistaken, this lute is of elvish make, too, and is still beautifully in tune when he traces reverent fingers across the strings. He turns it over in his hands, admiring the shape, the burnishing of the wood, the intricate carvings.

He won’t be able to take this home with him. If anybody were to see it, he’d be hard pressed to give an answer as to where he got it from—he can’t just say ‘I took it from a Faerie Ring’ or they’d have him drugged and thrown into his own prison-wing in Lettenhove manor faster than he could blink, and at this point he isn’t sure he’d blame them.

He’s already taken the lute, though.

Might as well use it.

He inhales a shuddering breath, steels himself—for what, he doesn’t know, but he’s braced for it either way—and puts his hands to the strings, and—

The music that falls from this instrument, it’s…

There are no words. Jaskier has one of the finest educations you can get, in one of the most prestigious universities on the continent, graduating with full honours and a certification in the seven liberal arts, and he still has no words.

The music is the blood that runs in his veins. It’s the beating of his heart. It’s the drumming of hooves beneath him, the heaving of his lungs, the thunder of the race. It’s the cacophony of birdsong in the spring and the deafening rush of a waterfall over a cliff. It’s the harmony of a wolf pack. It’s the ground beneath his feet and the sky above his head and the endless rising and falling of the sun, the waxing and the waning of the moon, the roar of a wildcat and the lowing of cattle. It’s a surge of adrenaline and a spike of terror and a burning fury and a bubbling euphoria.

His head spins when his hands finally still, and he has to shake it just so he can hear the thoughts in his head. It feels like he’s been drugged. Or spelled.

He opens his songbook and begins to write.

* * *

Each time he leaves, he places the lute case carefully back inside the Circle, as pristine as he found it, alongside the offering.

With the dawning of spring comes longer days, warmer days, and he finds he can spend more time lost among the trees, seduced by the Faerie Ring and its magic lute that plays music like nothing he’s ever heard.

They’re breeding the mares again, catching each one as she comes into heat and putting her out with a stallion. It’s a busy time for him, though with the sun staying in the sky for longer he manages to slip away to his clearing—for hours at a time, some days.

It’s a balm. He couldn’t live without it.

Which is why, when he arrives there one crisp evening to find something standing in the Circle, he does not immediately turn and run.

* * *

His heart jumps into his throat and he almost doesn’t catch the white gelding as it tries to duck its shoulder, swinging onto its hindquarters to pivot around and bolt in the other direction. He yanks the rein and manages to bring it back around, but the gelding backs up, pinning its ears and snorting, before rearing up on its back legs and pawing at the air.

Jaskier is hard pressed to keep his seat, fixated as he is on the creature that turns to watch the display, and those golden eyes—the same golden eyes he’d seen all those months ago, beautiful and deadly—capture him so thoroughly that, when the gelding drops to the ground and then keeps going, throwing its head down and its hindquarters into the air, Jaskier tumbles from the saddle, tossed clear of the beast and hitting the ground hard. From the periphery of his vision he watches the gelding turn and bolt, kicking up a spray of pebbles as its shod hooves dig furrows into the hard-packed ground with the strength of its start, and it is long gone by the time he manages to raise his head.

Alright. He’s fucked.

Might as will have a proper look at the thing that’s going to eat him, he thinks bitterly to himself, forcing himself to his feet.

There’s no pain as he does, nor is there when he heaves in a few deep breathes, so no broken or even bruised ribs, though there is a scorching ache that lances up his flank as he twists, trying to regain his feet, and the material over his elbow is ripped and bloodied. He’s had worse falls; he hasn’t hit his head, nor has he broken anything, and a mere minute after coming off he’s already on upright. He hasn’t even winded himself.

It’s with no small amount of trepidation that he turns to face the golden-eyed creature watching him curiously. It has made no move to attack him, nor even really to acknowledge him—it merely stands there, prone, in the middle of its Circle, _watching_ him.

All Faeries are beautiful, but this one is truly a masterpiece, Jaskier muses to himself. Pale skin; white hair tumbling down to its shoulders; golden, curved horns protruding from just below its hairline and curving back, ending in slender points. The shade of them matches its eyes exactly, and its pupils are slitted, like a cat’s, though they are not thin with hatred or fury or hunger like Jaskier has seen from others of its kind. It wears a white, billowing shirt, unlaced at the front and not nearly thick enough to shield it from the early-spring chill, though it doesn’t seem to notice. The black, high-waisted trousers remind Jaskier of a warrior, and don’t look much like what he has seen other Faeries wearing; it goes barefoot, which _is_ more characteristic of the Fae.

A slender tail comes from somewhere, delicately curling around its lower leg. It’s black, like the talons that extend elegantly from the thing’s fingers, like the leather trousers that it wears. There is a beautiful, deadly grace to this creature: a _warrior_ , his mind warns him, though all he’s ever thought when looking at the Fae was _murderer_. It feels right, though. A beautiful killing machine. The creature sniffs him, delicately, and then opens its mouth, tasting the air, and Jaskier sees elongated canines peeking between its lips, and he swallows roughly.

It’s terribly handsome. And male, he notes, almost absently; nearly all of the Fae he has ever encountered have been difficult to pin down in that department, but this one is unmistakably male, with a broad chest and muscular thighs and—he keeps his gaze firmly away from the apex of its legs, but this is almost worse as his mind immediately supplies what he refuses to ogle for himself, mentally undressing the creature.

He swallows.

The planes of its face are angular and its mouth is much prettier than he likes to admit, on a beast such as a Faerie, though he supposes he’s never really taken much opportunity to _look_. It’s slightly scarred, though this seems only to accentuate its beauty, and Jaskier’s feelings are a confused mess of arousal and terror.

“I suppose you’re going to eat me now, aren’t you,” he says to it, resigned, and then kicks himself mentally for talking to it. There’s no point in _inviting_ it to do something; let Jaskier die with a little dignity, at least. Or as much dignity as he can manage, after being so spectacularly thrown from his horse.

“Hmm,” responds the creature, voice husky and low and rasping and _divine_ , and—yeah. Jaskier is fucked.


	5. Chapter 5

“Articulate,” Jaskier quips, before he realises what he’s saying, and he feels the cold finger of dread trail down his spine, stiffening him in place. He clamps his jaw tightly shut so that he can’t say anything else monumentally stupid.

“Hmm,” the Faerie says again, and then, “you’re—the singer. Songbird”

“I’m—yes, I come here to sing. And to write. And just to get away, y’know, because—” he cuts himself off, because he’s rambling, he’s a rambler, he’s always been a rambler and oh gods this Faerie is going to eat him and suck the marrow from his bones and why the _fuck_ did he think this was a good idea in the first place.

“You…” the Faerie fumbles with his words, apparently casting around for the vocabulary he needs to get his point across. Jaskier waits him out, carefully keeping his face neutral, and wonders how quickly the Faerie could be on him if he were to turn and run right now. He’d probably make—oh, three paces, he thinks charitably of himself. “You have a—your voice is… good.”

Jaskier blinks.

“It is?”

The Faerie nods, a little crease forming between his brows, and Jaskier gulps and flutters him a shaky smile.

That’s a _compliment_.

From a _Faerie._

He might actually be dead. Suppose he trotted in here on that white gelding, and the beast dumped him on the floor and he broke his neck. Or maybe it had dumped him on the floor and the Faerie had lunged for him. Or maybe he’d never even made it to the floor—maybe the creature had been waiting for them, and had jumped as soon as it had heard the tell-tale drumbeat of hooves on hard ground, and all of this is just a fever dream, the last thing his consciousness has decided to spit out before his soul departs his body forever.

He wonders if he’ll even be discovered. His corpse. Likely not, if the Faerie decides to eat him—or even if he doesn’t, nobody but him ever ventures out this far; by the time anybody comes across his body it will just be bones, lost in the woods, and they’ll never know who he was or what precisely had happened to him.

He wonders what his family will think happened to him. Perhaps they’ll think he just lost his mind, like his father—saddled up a horse and strode off into the woods to meet whatever fate Destiny deemed he deserved, which he supposes isn’t too far off the mark, really. Or maybe they’ll think he was seduced away, with promises of Faerieland and power and perpetual youth and obscene wealth and food fit for the gods, and walked quite willingly into the jaws of a Faerie, and was swallowed whole.

He casts a guilty look at the lute case sitting just inside the Faerie Circle and considers that this, too, isn’t very far off the mark.

He zones back in to look up at the Faerie and see a blatantly concerned expression gracing its preternaturally beautiful face. It feels a bit like looking at the sun; like he has to look at it from the corner of his eye.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the Faerie says gravely. “It’s not safe.”

Well, no shit. There’s a fucking Faerie standing not ten yards away from him, and the woods are filled with all kinds of monsters, and it’s all just fucking surreal—that a Fae is schooling him on how _unsafe_ he’s being. He can’t help the little smile that tugs at his lips, nor the short, sharp snort from bubbling up his throat and ripping out of his nose, an ugly noise that has the Faerie frowning further.

“Sorry—sorry,” Jaskier tries to placate, squinting his eyes shut and scraping a hand over his face. “I just—it’s been a bit of a long day, and this is all… very strange, and I’ve just fallen off my horse and now it’s fucked off and—well. You’re here talking to me, and you haven’t eaten me yet, and you’re telling me it’s _not safe,_ and just—” another snort escapes him, quite without his consent, and then he has to sit down very suddenly and let the hysterical laughter bubble out of him, all while being scrutinised by the Faerie as though it’s never seen a human before.

“I wouldn’t eat you. Why on earth would I eat you?” the Faerie asks him, when the laughter has mostly dissolved into hiccups. The glint of fangs behind those lovely lips almost sets him off again, but he manages to control himself.

Jaskier squints up at him. This is perhaps the single most bizarre moment of his entire life, and he once subdued his father and locked him up in his own home. “That’s what Faeries do,” he tells the Faerie, as though it doesn’t _know_ this. “You attack and eat humans.”

The Faerie, amazingly, is frowning further. “I’m not—” he begins to say, and then cuts himself off with a low, frustrated growl. “It doesn’t matter. You should go.”

“I can’t,” Jaskier points out, smiling. He wonders if he’s really going mad. “My horse is gone.”

The Faerie simply lifts a single, unimpressed brow, then jerks his head, lifting his chin up and flicking his eyes to something behind Jaskier.

He turns and, lo and behold, standing very sheepishly and splattered with mud and trailing a truly impressive amount of foliage in his mane and tail, is the white gelding. The reins have come over his head and snapped, and when he takes a step Jaskier sees that his far hind shoe has twisted half of the way off, but he’s _there_ and uninjured and watching the Faerie with pricked ears and no apparent sign of the terror he’d experienced earlier.

This day cannot possibly get any weirder, so Jaskier shrugs and stands and makes his way over to the gelding, crooning softly to it, before running a careful hand down the beast’s sweaty neck.

Horribly aware of the Fae’s attention on him, he runs his hands over the horse, checking his legs, his chest, his flanks. The shoe he spends a good twenty minutes twisting the nails out off and then pulling the rest of the way off, slipping it into the saddlebag—you can never be carrying too much iron, and they’ll probably be able to reshape it at the forge so it can be re-used, so there’s no point tossing it away. The hoof seems undamaged, and Jaskier wheedles a stone out of a front shoe before pronouncing the gelding perfectly sound, if a little rattled.

It grazes happily enough, and Jaskier doesn’t even bother exchanging the bridle for the halter, simply securing the reins so they won’t come over the horse’s head when it begins grazing.

With his horse sorted, he turns back to the Faerie. It stares back at Jaskier.

Most of the initial terror has waned, leaving him with a burning curiosity and a simmering lust he’s doing his best to ignore. It’s one thing to have a conversation with a Faerie; it’s another thing entirely to fuck one.

The Faerie is still looking at him as though Jaskier is the most fascinating yet-vaguely-horrifying thing he’s ever seen, so Jaskier, a touch of that terror-induced hysteria still marginally affecting him, does the first thing that pops into his mind and grins at the Faerie.

Who looks… almost constipated, Jaskier judges.

“You should go,” the Faerie repeats. His voice sounds like boulders crashing down a mountainside in the middle of a thunderstorm. Jaskier shivers, though he tries to hide it.

“Yeah, probably,” he agrees easily. “Do you have a name?”

It’s the wrong thing to say. The Faerie peels its lips back, baring its (rather longer than Jaskier first thought) fangs, and snarls, “ _go!”_ The word is a thunderclap across the clearing, and _now_ the Faerie looks like a Faerie—murderous, and _hungry._ Jaskier’s legs are moving before he gives them explicit permission to do so, and then he’s swinging himself into the saddle before he’s even sorted the reins. That’s fine. Jaskier has never ridden this particular animal without the reins to steer but as long as they’re running _away_ from the monster rather than towards it then he’s willing to deal with whatever happens afterwards. At least he’ll be alive to do so.

He shifts his weight, drives one heel into the horse’s side, and manages to point the animal to the exit of the clearing before he risks shooting a look back at the Fae, wondering why it hasn’t attacked yet.

The Faerie hasn’t moved to attack _at all_ ; it stands rooted in place, and Jaskier’s court-honed senses catch a flicker of—is that _guilt?_ Regret, perhaps?—across the creature’s face, before it catches his eyes and growls, low and menacing.

The horse bolts, taking Jaskier with it.

* * *

They return unscathed, the horse having taken the familiar road home with Jaskier disinclined to stop it, only managing to slow it to a reasonable trot and then a walk by the time they catch sight of the barns, and the creature seems entirely unfazed by the experience when Jaskier begins untacking and stabling it.

This whole situation is… wrong.

Jaskier thinks that this is the first time he’s really, properly acknowledged that, which—considering that he’s been sneaking away to a Faerie Ring to _flirt with death_ for _months_ now, really just exacerbates the problem he’s having.

The conundrum, Jaskier reflects, is this: he’s losing his mind.

He’s lost his mind.

Past tense, present tense; he supposes it doesn’t matter either way; the future is the same.

He knew it was coming; with parents like _that_ , it was only a matter of time before his mind cracked, just as theirs had and he was consigned, like his father, to his own padded prison. Beautiful and sterile and safe, where he can spend the rest of his days. A good place in which to die.

So, he’s losing his mind, and he saw it coming, and now he doesn’t know if the encounter he’d had with the Fae was real.

It’s _terrifying_.

There was no reason for that Faerie to have let him leave alive. No reason at all. Even if it _had_ been trapped in that Faerie Ring (the mythos about which is woefully confused, to the point where Jaskier knows absolutely _nothing_ about such things, because everything about them is contradictory), Jaskier had spoken to it—had asked something of it. Had asked its _name_. It would have been terrifyingly easy for the creature to use its Fae charm and lure him into its clutches.

But it _hadn’t_.

And now Jaskier is left wondering whether he had simply hallucinated the whole thing. Left wondering if his mind has indeed begun to crack under the strain, and crack terribly; if his mind has concocted vivid phantoms to terrorise him; if he’s going to go the same way as his father and end up, ranting and mad, in his own closed-off wing of the manor.

It’s terrifying and for the next two days he doubts everything he sees, everything he hears, jumping at every creak of the floor and scrutinising the face of every person he talks to, wondering if they’re _real,_ if he can trust his own mind—and it’s exhausting.

So, he saddles up a horse, and mounts up, and rides back to the clearing, because he has to be _sure._

* * *

The ride is quiet, but Jaskier is tense and the mare is tense under him. She’s springy and wants to keep running when he pulls her up, fighting his hand and tossing her head and kicking her heels into the air in frustration, but eventually she submits and Jaskier manages to steer her through the forest, along the well-worn path he knows now like the back of his hand, into the clearing that has been both a comfort and a horror.

It’s empty.

Jaskier honestly doesn’t know what he expected.

The Ring is there, innocuous amongst the grass that never seems to grow longer than a few inches, while the grass on the hinterlands beyond the woods is knee-height. The grass within the circle is slightly bluer than that which grows outside, and the mushroom caps are huge and undisturbed by animals who would probably ordinarily eat them, and Jaskier dismounts with shaking hands while the mare paws at the ground beside him, disgruntled with the world. He ties her to a tree, not trusting her not to break free if he ground-ties her, and lets her graze with pinned ears while he goes to inspect the Ring.

It’s _empty._

The lute isn’t there, and he hasn’t brought his own, but he _has_ brought his songbook, and—well. If he’s going mad then he supposes it won’t ever matter that his music is less than perfect; it’s not as though he’ll _remember_ it, probably.

He pulls his songbook from his saddlebag, goes and sits with his back to the rough bark of a grand oak tree, and leafs through the pages. He’s not sure what he’s looking for.

Jaskier’s head feels queerly heavy—the panic, he thinks, that he’s really going insane. That every time he’s come to this Faerie Ring, it has simply been a fever dream, the concoction of a mind broken under the stress. Maybe there were never any Faeries at all; maybe he’s still at the manor, attended by his siblings as he lays strapped to his bed, a raving lunatic, locked in the confines of his own mind and this nightmare he has wrought. Maybe he never even left fucking _Oxenfurt_ , and—

He heaves in a breath, lets it out, and finds the song he wrote for his mother, after she died. The song he wrote _here_ , in this clearing, the gentle music of the elven lute from the Faerie Circle filtering through the air about him; he’s never sung these words aloud, but he’s played the melody enough to remember it, and put words to it without an instrument in his hands at all.

The song is mournful and lovely, and he isn’t sure who he’s mourning as he sings it.

The Ring is silent while he sings; usually birds join in with his lute, chirping the notes to one another and amplifying it far beyond the clearing itself, but this time they are silent, and it’s eerie and alien and even the mare does him the courtesy of waiting until he closes his mouth, finished, before she snorts.

“I’ve gone mad,” he tells her. She flicks an ear at him, but doesn’t make a sound.

“I’ve gone mad,” he repeats, just to hear the words aloud. “The world’s gone mad, and I’ve gone with it.”

Saying it aloud makes it real. He hadn’t really thought how it would feel to say it, to have heard the words aloud in his own voice, but the sensation sends shivers down his spine and he nearly stumbles as he makes his way over to her, catching himself just in time (to her derisive snort) that he doesn’t land on his face. His body feels queer and heavy, like it isn’t his own. He wonders idly if this is how it begins. The deterioration of his faculties, until he’s as frail as his mother had been.

The mare nips him when he does up her girth, readying her to mount up again, and he barely notices the sting of it.

* * *

He goes back to the Ring, because of course he does.

At this point it’s an addiction.

What can he do? He’s crazy.

* * *

The Faerie’s back.

_The Faerie is back._

_What the fuck._

“What the fuck?” he breathes.

The Faerie scowls and tosses something out of the circle—the lute case, Jaskier realises, and he hadn’t noticed the Faerie was holding it because _the Faerie is real, and right fucking there,_ what the fuck—

He squeaks, throwing himself from the horse and across the clearing, snatching the case up from the ground before it can bounce a second time, smoothing his hands over the tempered wood and checking for scratches or blemishes. It’s unmarked—elvish woodcraft, some neutral, impartial corner of his mind whispers to him, that he soundly ignores, because he’s _three feet away from a Faerie._

Why does this keep happening to him? He’s just thrown himself to his _death_ at the hands of a Faerie. For a _lute_. That isn’t even damaged because it was made by fucking elves.

“Oh, fuck,” he says aloud, figuring he should at least get the words out before he dies. So sue him, he likes the poetry of it. Not that he’s being particularly poetic right now, but then, he _is_ about to die. The Faerie looks… puzzled.

“For you,” it rumbles, all the savagery that had turned its voice from a rasp into a roar that had sent Jaskier running the last time now faded. It’s somehow become the purr of a huge cat, or the pleased grumble of a wolf. Something comforting, rather than immediately threatening.

“For me?” Jaskier _does not_ squeak, his voice is steady and perfectly level, thank you. He thinks idly about running, but he doesn’t think he could get his legs to work, and anyway, he’s close enough to really see the golden hue of the creature’s eyes, the way its hair falls about its face, the unearthly-pale skin that’s luminous and webbed with veins.

“That—song, last time.” The Faerie looks uncomfortable as it tries to string its words together, and Jaskier feels almost… sympathetic, as he watches the creature struggle so obviously with its vocabulary. Its tail lashes behind it, as an irate cat’s would, and Jaskier is briefly mesmerised by the resounding _crack_ as it snaps like a whip.

“I wrote it for my mother,” he finds himself explaining, then snaps his mouth shut in horror. He shouldn’t be fucking _talking to it!_

The Faerie hums. “It was beautiful,” it finally says, after nearly a minute of silence wherein Jaskier contemplates turning and bolting again, his legs becoming steadier as the terror grows past the threshold for panic and into that hazy, hard-to-distinguish grey zone that Jaskier thinks is called _survival mode_. The words jolt him out of his musing, causing him to look up and meet the Faerie’s eyes despite himself.

They’re… warm.

That’s not how he’d ever expected to describe a Faerie. It’s a little disconcerting.

“Sing it again? Music this time?” The Faerie nods at the case he’d just _tossed_ onto the ground, and, yeah, Jaskier had forgotten—

“You can’t just _throw this thing around,_ you know,” Jaskier scolds, the censure in his voice a far cry from the abject terror he was sure had coloured it before, and the Faerie blinks at him, nonplussed.

“This—it’s a _delicate instrument!”_ Jaskier defends, and then the Faerie cocks its head and _smiles_ at him. It’s a tiny, tiny quirk of the lips—but still a smile.

This conversation is so far past what Jaskier’s mind could possibly invent that he’s suddenly, terribly sure that this is real, and happening, and maybe he’s not so insane after all. At least, not insane enough to be hallucinating this—nobody _really_ sane would have stayed to exchange even one word with the Fae, and here he is _conversing_ with it.

“Will you play?” it asks, and Jaskier huffs a sigh, all his frustration swept away in the face of that _agonising_ smile, and considers the Faerie for a moment more before abruptly coming to a decision. He slings the lute case over his shoulder and returns to his horse.

The stallion has only dropped its head to graze, the reins halfway down its neck and threatening to fall the rest of the way, so he ties it to a tree and lets it graze and pulls his songbook from his satchel and goes and settles himself in his preferred spot. He moves mechanically, half-expecting to snap out of a nap at any moment, despite his thoughts that he couldn’t _possibly_ be making any of this up. The whole while, he feels the Faerie’s eyes on him, watching him, and he feels his face flush under the attention while he makes himself comfortable against the tree he’s chosen to lean against, the trunk a familiar presence against his back and the lute an accustomed weight in his hands. He pulls a short, sharp melody from the strings, enough to remind him how the instrument sings in his hands.

He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. He’s half sure he’s under a spell—that the Faerie’s smile had drawn something from him he’d never intended to reveal, and now he’s going to perform his mother’s song for a monstrous creature he’s only met twice, has shared fewer than two dozen words with, really.

He fingers the lute strings again, peeks up at the Faerie watching him still, and then begins singing.

* * *

“Songbird.”

Jaskier meets the Faerie’s gaze across the clearing. The Fae itself seems content to sprawl in the blue grass, its silver hair a halo about its head, its golden horns and blackened claws bared irreverently to the sky above and anybody who cared to look. He’s once again distracted by the tail, curling about the creature’s leg as if it has a mind of its own. Jaskier is comfortable in his nest by the tree, the lute spread across his knees and his notebook by his side, pages filling up with nonsense songs as he tries out lyrics and rhymes and combinations thereof. “Hmm?”

“Just—your name. Songbird.”

“That’s not my—”

The Faerie makes an indignant scoffing noise that silences Jaskier more effectively than if he’d said outright to _be quiet_ , because that’s the most human noise Jaskier has heard him make and it’s— _endearing_ , his mind supplies, the word still knocking around in his head after he’d spent twenty minutes trying to find a way to fit it into a song. _Endearing_. Not the first word he’d apply to a Faerie, but then, he _is_ mad. Or maybe not. He needs to think about it a bit more.

“Can I ask your name?”

The Faerie actually lifts its head to shoot Jaskier a look. The disdain on its face is _cutting_. Jaskier responds with a weak smile and says, “guess not then.”

“Names are power,” the Faerie replies, which actually doesn’t explain a lot but something in the back of Jaskier’s mind seems to recognise the phrase, attributing it to some legend or mythos about the Fae he’d read months ago in his research— _names are power, never give one yours;_ Jaskier had dismissed it as nonsense at the time, considering that he didn’t know anybody who’d gotten close enough to a Faerie without being eaten for long enough to even hold a conversation where one’s name might come up. “Keep yours, and I’ll keep mine.”

Jaskier nods his head, and the Faerie drops its head back onto the grass and closes its eyes. Its golden horns score furrows through the grass. The creature is _beautiful_ , Jaskier has decided; even the deadlier features seem softened, here in the flower-suffused clearing, and the fear that Jaskier had felt upon first seeing it has waned to a low-simmering lust that he forces himself to ignore. _Do not fuck the Faerie._

The sun is well on its way back towards the horizon, and loath as he is to do so, Jaskier has to admit to himself that it’s time he headed home.

“Hey,” he says softly, and the Faerie grunts in response. “I, er—should be getting home, now.”

The Faerie sits up and fixes him with a piercing stare. Jaskier gives in to the impulse and shifts uneasily under the creature’s gaze.

“You shouldn’t come back,” the Faerie says simply, then lays its head back against the grass and closes its golden eyes, serene.

“I—what?”

The Faerie lifts its head again, fixing its gaze upon him, and looks almost surprised at Jaskier’s outburst, at the anguish it sees on his face.

“It’s not safe, Songbird,” the Faerie says almost _gently_ , and _oh_ —that name’s sticking then, and Jaskier just wants to cry. A bit. He’s forced himself to develop a thick skin over the past however-many-months—or years?—it’s been since the Fae invaded, but the past few hours he’s just spent with his head and his heart full of songs have managed to strip him of it, if only temporarily. Frustration coils and grows and mounts within him.

“I know it’s _not safe_.” Jaskier doesn’t like how plaintive he sounds. There isn’t much he can do about it, however. “I _know_ —I’ve known since the beginning. But—”

He stops, unsure as to what he had been about to say, and the Faerie gives him a—a commiserating look, Jaskier would call it, if he’d been at all convinced that the Fae are capable of being _commiserating_.

“You can take the lute,” the Faerie promises him, as though that would convince him. Jaskier shakes his head.

“No, I—um. If I came back with an elvish lute they—my family, the villagers—they wouldn’t leave me alone until I told them where I got it, and I can’t think of a single lie that wouldn’t land me in a comfortable room with a big lock on the door.”

The Faerie actually _smirks_ at that, and Jaskier glares. It’s companionable. He’s having a companionable moment with a Faerie.

Maybe he is mad after all.

“Hide it, then,” the Faerie suggests, turning back to look up at the sky. Jaskier sneaks his own look, but can’t see what’s so interesting about it—a clear blue, not a cloud in sight. No bird will fly over the clearing, nor insect, so it’s not like there’s anything to _look_ at. Maybe the Faerie’s seeing something different.

“Hide it where? Where the elements or the animals won’t get to it, or it won’t be found?” Admittedly Jaskier probably _could_ manage to find somewhere it would be safe, but… it’s just as safe here, isn’t it? And _here_ has good company.

A Faerie. Good company.

“I want you to have it.” The Faerie’s voice pitches lower and Jaskier gulps at the command in it. “It’s of no use to me anyway; I can’t play.”

Jaskier seizes the moment unrepentantly. “Keep it here then, and I’ll come visit, as I have been, to borrow it. I don’t see why anything has to change.” His heart hammers in his chest.

The Faerie is silent for a long, long while, and Jaskier forces himself to swallow his disappointment and begin packing away his things, affixing the saddlebag to his horse and spending perhaps more time than strictly necessary checking the creature and his tack over, ensuring they’re ready for the ride home. Finally, the Faerie speaks up.

“It’s not safe.” It’s also not a _no_.

“Until next time,” Jaskier says quietly, sure that the Faerie will hear him, and mounts up and exits the clearing without waiting for a reply. _Until next time_.

* * *

‘Next time’ isn’t for a week, because there’s a complication with one of his broodmares and it’s early enough in her gestation that losing a foal would be easy, so he takes shifts with Hanna and a stable boy to stay with her and feed her gruel and medicinal plants, and by the time Jaskier pronounces her well enough to come off of box rest and return to the fields, an entire week has passed and the days are getting longer.

The ride this time feels different, and Jaskier doesn’t think it’s because spring is well and truly here and thus the way is a lot _greener_ that it has been previously.

He thinks it might be because this time, he’s going _towards_ somebody, not running from his own problems. The distinction feels important.

The Faerie isn’t in the Ring, this time, but the lute is—half over the boundary, like always, and Jaskier doesn’t mind not having the company when he picks up the lute case and feels the ridges of the carved wood.

He’s beginning to suspect that it’s actually fairly difficult for the Faerie to show itself. Whether it’s physically taxing, or there’s some magic on the Ring that prevents it from showing up at certain times, Jaskier can’t be sure; he’s not an expert on Faerie lore by any means, but he can’t imagine that hopping back and forth between the Faerie Ring and wherever the Faerie goes when it’s _not_ in the Faerie Ring can be very easy.

* * *

The Faerie isn’t there all the time. At the beginning, in the first months of spring, it isn’t even there _half_ the time.

Jaskier cherishes the days where he walks into the clearing to find the Faerie sitting sprawled out on the grass, silver hair and golden horns and its tail flicking irreverently across the ground, ignoring Jaskier’s entrance in favour of dozing in the sun, or weaving the grass together in baskets or hats or small figures, or simply meditating. The Faerie doesn’t speak to him, at first, the conversation they’d had when Jaskier had played for it now apparently forgotten, and it only blinks at him when Jaskier tries to talk to it. Every word he coaxes from the creature’s mouth seems to make it draw in on itself, and it’s only with the patience of a _saint_ that Jaskier manages to eke out short exchanges at all.

For weeks, Jaskier rambles at the Faerie, occasionally wheedling out one- or two word observations on some topic or another, and then slowly they become short sentences, still gruff and grammatically incorrect, but the Faerie begins to tentatively offer its own opinions and then _ask_ questions, and shoulder some of the burden of the conversation so that Jaskier isn’t the one carrying it all the time.

It’s slow work, and frustrating, at times, and more importantly _exhausting_. It’s challenging. _Mentally_ challenging. Enough that Jaskier doesn’t feel the confines of their territory lines quite so terrible; enough that he doesn’t feel so ready to crawl out of his skin.

* * *

He no longer brings the small token gifts of bread and fruit and honey; he begins to pack his lunch with twice as much as he imagines he’d need, and then when he first sees the Faerie devour it with the relish of somebody who hasn’t eaten good food in a long time, he begins to bring even more.

“Do you need to eat?” he asks once, with morbid fascination, while watching the Faerie somehow eat _half a pig_ with gusto.

“Not really,” the creature replies, cracking the bones to inspect the marrow. Jaskier flinches at the sound, at the flash of those fangs, and then steadfastly pretends he didn’t. “But I miss it.”

That’s another thing; they never talk about how the Faerie came to _be_ in the Ring, and anytime the conversation comes near to the topic, Jaskier dutifully steers it away again.

“I could bring you some ale, next time,” he offers. He doesn’t bring it for himself to drink—at least, not the strong stuff—because he needs to keep his senses sharp for the ride home.

The Faerie looks up with perhaps its most intense stare yet, and Jaskier squirms under it. Those golden eyes are _harsh._ “You’d do that?” it demands, something suspiciously close to _hope_ lighting up its face, and Jaskier feels his heart clench at the sight.

“Sure,” he manages to say, with only a very tiny voice crack that he’s sure the Faerie didn’t notice anyway. His next words are much stronger. “I’ll pack some Cintran ale, if we’ve got any left. There’s probably some good wine hidden away still.”

They share a brief silence, while Jaskier thinks about all the alcohol he’ll probably never be able to taste again and the Faerie looks as impassive as it usually does, and then Jaskier breaks it by saying, “do you think all the deer have formed their own societies now that they’re not being hunted by us? No, don’t look at me like that, hear me out—”

* * *

Jaskier talks about his mother. It begins when the Faerie mentions offhandedly one day that he hasn’t heard Jaskier play that song, the _first_ song, again, and Jaskier replies that, well, he’d never intended to play it in the first place, because the person he’d written it for is dead, now. The Faerie goes all quiet in the way it does when it’s thinking too hard about something, and its face twists a bit, as though it’s regretting bringing the topic up at all, and Jaskier sighs and begins to tell his story.

He doesn’t tell all of it, of course. He has an air of mystery to maintain, though the Faerie would probably snort if it heard him say that. No; he speaks about his mother, how she’d always been… queer, how she had struggled with Jaskier’s younger sister’s pregnancy and had been advised not to have any more children—

(“How many siblings do you have?” the Faerie asks curiously.

“Three sisters and a brother,” Jaskier replies easily, thinking of little Zofia, the most terrible toddler anybody has ever had the misfortune of meeting, and Marek, who by now is likely wondering where Jaskier is.

“Hmm,” the Faerie says, and then, “I have brothers.” He doesn’t offer anything more, and Jaskier doesn’t ask, but there’s an air of wistfulness there that says these brothers probably aren’t dead, just… lost, maybe. Jaskier hadn’t really thought about if this invasion would be difficult for the Faeries, too. Or maybe it’s just difficult for _this_ Faerie, who has been banished to a Faerie Ring for unknown reasons. He shrugs, takes another swig of his ale, and continues.)

\--and that his father had gotten her pregnant a few years ago, now, while she was fading before their eyes, and the pregnancy had both buoyed her and drained her.

The Faerie looks at him with sad eyes while Jaskier explains how she’d died. How at the end she hadn’t recognised any of them. How he thinks that that’s the worst part of it—not that she’d died with a babe in her arms, nor that she’d still been _young_ when she passed—no; she had died not knowing that anybody loved her. She’d died alone, surrounded by strangers. She’d died _afraid_.

The Faerie lifts its own ale in a silent toast, tail curling up over its shoulder and winding around one arm, its golden horns and golden eyes somehow _comfortable,_ now, and Jaskier gets drunker than he should. The Faerie tells him a story about a man it had met years ago with _six_ wives, each with six children each, and half of _those_ children with children of their own, so that this man has more children than he knows what to do with and more on the way, if the swelling bellies of his wives are anything to go by; so many so that his eldest son had eventually threatened to castrate his father if he didn’t stop producing more heirs, and Jaskier laughs until his stomach hurts.

* * *

It occurs to Jaskier, on an unseasonably _hot_ spring day when he pops the cork off a wine bottle and pours the Faerie a glass, that he’s made a _friend._

* * *

Hanna squints at him. She cocks her head and stares at him, then cocks it the other way and squints at him again.

He ignores her, focusing instead on cleaning the frankly _disgusting_ tack he’s just pulled off his horse, dipping his cloth into the new saddle-soap one of the village women had asked him to try out. So far, so good.

“Have you been having sex?” she demands, and Jaskier drops both the cloth, the tub of soap, and the noseband he’d been balancing over his arm while trying to apply more soap to the cloth. They clatter to the ground and Jaskier stares at them for a moment, unseeing, before searching out his sister’s gaze.

“Why the fuck would you think that?” he asks, honestly shocked, and she looks shocked at _him_.

“Wh—you’ve been, ah, weirdly _happy_ , recently,” she explains, as though that’s a satisfying explanation at all. “I just—figured you’d been having sex.”

He stares. “Hanna,” he says, a bit helplessly, and then— “Hanna, who the _fuck_ could I have been having sex with?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out!” she exclaims, throwing her hands up. Absently he picks his cloth and soap and noseband up off the floor, checking it over for dirt—the little pot of soap held up to him throwing it on the ground, at least, and it smells good and actually seems to condition the leather as well as cleaning it, so he’ll be sure to find Ingrid out and commend her for her work later on—before setting them aside and looking at his sister.

“I haven’t been having sex,” he tells her. “I’ve been—” time for a little honestly, perhaps, “—writing music, again.”

“Oh.” She doesn’t look like she understands. “Er—had you stopped?”

And this is a safer conversation, although still _uncomfortable_ , so he just says, “yeah, after mother—and the fucking Faeries, it was… hard. So I stopped. And now I’ve started again.”

They clean tack in silence again, and then Hanna says, “I’m glad. I was worried about you.”

More silence.

“Thank you,” he forces himself to say, past the lump in his throat.

* * *

“You kept coming back,” the Faerie mumbles, drink slurring its words. They’re lying almost side by side, staring up at the steadily-darkening sky, a barrier of mushrooms and flat stones between them. Jaskier kind of wants to reach over and grab its hand, or run his fingers through that hair, or across his horns, or maybe just finally see what that tail feels like. He doesn’t, because even after months of talking with his Faerie he’s not convinced he wouldn’t lose the hand. “You _keep_ coming back.”

“Hm?” he mumbles, confused. They’ve been silent for a while; he doesn’t know what the Faerie is getting at.

“Why did you keep coming back?” the creature asks, studiously not looking over at Jaskier, and Jaskier thinks he gets it.

“You looked like you needed a friend,” he says. _Because I was going mad, and needed something new,_ he doesn’t say. _Because you were an escape,_ he doesn’t say. _Because I was afraid I was going to lose my mind,_ really _lose my mind, like both of my parents,_ he doesn’t say. He turns his head to appraise the Faerie and finds the Faerie looking back at him, and thinks that it heard all of the words he doesn’t say, because it offers him a wry smile and a slow blink, its golden eyes piercing and hazy from the drink at the same time, and Jaskier’s mouth is suddenly very, very dry.

He turns to look back up at the sky.

“I should go,” he hears himself saying.

“Go then, Songbird, and be safe,” he hears the Faerie tell him.

He wants to reach over and squeeze the Faerie’s hand. He nearly does it, too, except something of his intentions must show on his face, because the Faerie laces both of its hands over its stomach, and closes its eyes, pointedly ignoring Jaskier as he stands and stumbles over to his horse.

* * *

Jaskier is sat beneath the tree, gently plucking at the elvish lute. He’s not playing anything in particular, simply listening to how the music filters through the muggy air.

The Faerie is sprawled in the Faerie Ring, its eyes closed, face tilted toward the thunderclouds gathering above. Jaskier idly plucks at the strings, canvassing the strong jaw, the rough features of its face, so delicately put together. The golden horns peeking from its silvered locks. Its alabaster skin, delicate and yet impervious to mortal weapons. Its lips hide canines built to kill; behind the curve of its gently curled fists lie talons a quarter inch long and razor sharp; its senses are sharpened far beyond what Jaskier can even imagine.

Every inch of this creature is finely honed to _kill_.

And yet… and yet somehow, in between Jaskier’s long winded rants about his family and his horses and Valdo fucking Marx, Jaskier has managed to _befriend_ it. Has strong-armed it into becoming a confidante. Has, against all the odds, gained himself this creature’s… regard.

Jaskier appraises the Faerie and thinks that, if he himself has gone mad, then he’s dragged this creature with him.

Somewhere, thunder crashes, rattling the forest with its rolling drumbeat. After a moment, there is a flash of lightning, accompanied by another resounding clap of thunder.

Rain begins to fall in heavy sheets. Curiously, it’s warm, so Jaskier only closes his songbook and packs it away in his leather saddlebag, storing the lute away in its case as well (not that the elven make would allow the instrument to be damaged by something so simple as _rain_ ). He tilts his own head back, the bark of the tree harsh and unyielding against his back, his head, but he pays it no minds and closes his eyes and feels the downpour on his face.

Thunder crashes again, and he opens his eyes to check on the horse: placidly grazing, paying no mind to the inclement weather. His saddle is getting soaked, though. He should probably be heading home.

He glances over to the Faerie, and pauses: it’s sat up, its face tilted to the sky, and looks so _damnably peaceful_ that Jaskier can almost forget it’s a bloodthirsty monster, kin to the creatures who have _invaded his world_ , capable of tearing a human in two with very little effort. Instead, soaked to the skin as it is and smiling faintly under the downpour, it looks like—an old God, Jaskier thinks blasphemously, fascinated by the slow drip of water that catches on its horns and thoroughly soaks into its hair. Its eyes are closed, the gold hidden away, but it still looks like a Lord of the Forest from one of his sister’s novels; some ancient creature who walked among these trees when they were young, and will walk among these trees when they die, surrounded by their children.

It’s too much. Jaskier wants too much.


	6. Chapter 6

Jaskier tried going a different route to find the clearing, and it hasn’t worked.

He tries telling himself that it just hasn’t worked _yet_ , that he’s going to step around the very next tree and into the clearing, and the Faerie will be there waiting for him, and he’ll be able to sit down and have his lunch and he won’t be eaten by whatever is _stalking_ him, he’s sure of it—

But the likelihood is that he’s actually just lost.

He just doesn’t understand _how_ he’s lost. He knows this land, this terrain; the route he’d picked should have taken him an hour east, which he had managed, and then north, on a straight path directly to the clearing. It’s _easy_. And, yes, he’s on foot rather than on horseback, but he can calculate the length of a hike just as well as he can for a hack, thank you, so it’s not _his calculations_ that have landed him in this mess.

…Except they must have done, because he can’t think of any _other_ reason he’d be absolutely, hopelessly lost, unless the trees and the terrain were somehow moving. Which is too horrifying to think about, so Jaskier steadfastly isn’t.

He pauses. Squints up through the leafy canopy above, to check the position of the sun. Makes a slight adjustment to which direction he’s going, takes another swig of water from his flask, and forges onwards, horse in tow.

Jaskier knows these woods. He knows these trees, these trails. He knows how the shadows move, what a deer moving through the undergrowth sounds like, what birds up in the branches sound like. He knows what the forest looks like.

At the moment, it looks _menacing._ Dark and hungry. It looks like there’s something hiding in the trees, ready to pounce. He doesn’t know _where_ it is, exactly, just that it’s _there_.

Today he’d chosen to ride one of the geldings out, hoping the creature’s placid nature wouldn’t mind going off the trail into the spooky woods to try and find a new path, and he was right: the creature hadn’t minded. Right up until a branch had snapped, far off beyond their immediate line of sight, and the horse had pitched such a fit it ended up throwing a shoe, one of its fronts, meaning Jaskier had to get off and lead it. The gelding hadn’t seemed too concerned about the new arrangements, once it had gotten over whatever had sent it into such a state in the first place.

The horseshoe is heavy in his pocket and he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it won’t do anything against whatever it is that’s after them. There’s a feeling in his gut that he’s _fucked_ , and it isn’t the ordinary fear of the dark or of the woods, or even of the Fae themselves: it’s a primordial instinct that he’s being hunted by something against which he has no defence.

And he knows that it knows where he is, and he’s sure that it _knows_ he knows, so he doesn’t mind whistling a jaunty little tune trying to calm himself. Around him, the forest is deadly silent, the birds and creatures all fled. The ground is springy beneath his feet and the new growth is a wall that threatens to trap him as he fights through branches and bushes and tree roots that are, frankly, _far_ too large, and behind him the gelding rolls its eyes and snorts and makes an idiot of itself as Jaskier tries to lead it calmly through the woods.

Whatever it is must be getting closer. The gelding had been almost relaxed, before.

The light seems to be fading, too, which is worrying, because it should only be just past midday. Not that Jaskier thinks whatever it is can somehow manipulate time, or anything like that—but it can manipulate _him_ , surely; manipulate what he sees; so if it’s close enough to make the light fade then it must be close enough to eat him, easily. Faeries like to play games.

It’s a disconcerting thought. Jaskier tries to put it out of his mind, and concentrate on the hike.

He breaks off another branch, leads the gelding past the stump of it, and swallows his nerves to look over his shoulder and be sure that no part of the saddle manages to catch on it. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he looked around and _saw_ something. Probably scream. Or cry. Or some combination thereof. He doesn’t know if he’d try to run; he knows there isn’t a point, though he can’t imagine not even _trying_.

He turns back around, and the forest looks _completely_ different.

Before, there had been one tree in his immediate surroundings; tall and gnarled and probably several hundred years old, thicker around than the horse.

Now there are three young trees; birch, he thinks, if the white of their bark is anything to go by; skinny and mottled and _nothing like_ what had been there before.

There’s a quiet growl, down and to his left, and Jaskier pretends not to hear it.

He feels sick. His stomach roils with fear, and it takes every ounce of self-discipline he has not to pitch to his knees and empty his breakfast onto the ground. Terror is an acrid taste at the back of his mouth; he swallows, to no avail, and tries drinking water, only to make his stomach feel full and uncomfortable. He pretends he doesn’t feel eyes on the back of his neck, watching him, because he knows if he acknowledges them even in the smallest way then he’s done. Dinner.

Instead he marches on.

Mushrooms have begun to grow copiously, now, crumbling under Jaskier’s boots every time he takes a step. Where before there had been an abundance of flowers there is now only grass and the mellow brown caps of hundreds and hundreds of mushrooms, covering the ground and the bases of the trees. Jaskier hadn’t even known mushrooms could grow like this.

 _They probably can’t_ , he thinks snidely to himself as he spies a mushroom the size of a small dog. _And I’m probably going to die_.

It’s a sobering thought. He wonders what his family will think, when neither he nor his horse returns. If they’ll be sad, or if they’ll sigh and say, _well, we saw it coming_. They’ve mentioned to him before now that he’s spending too much time away from the safety of the manor house, of the lands they have warded. He normally shrugs them off, declaring that _he’s fine,_ confident that his Faerie either won’t ever harm him or is in no position to do so even if it wanted to, confident that he knows these woods, confident that the horses he rides are fast enough to get him away.

Jaskier kicks at a mushroom. It crumbles under his foot, leaving him unsatisfied and also with bits of mushroom all over one of his boots.

He wonders, idly, if his Faerie would be sad. If it would guess what had happened, or if it would just assume that Jaskier no longer wanted to be friends. If it would wait for him to appear. If it did wait, how long it would wait _for_.

Jaskier is terribly sorry, suddenly, thinking about his Faerie waiting for him, day after day, to return to the Faerie ring, with food and ale and stories and songs, to play the Faerie’s elven lute and tell bad jokes and discuss the minutia of deer-societies. If it would ever give up waiting, acknowledging that its friend won’t ever be coming back.

The part of him that cares hopes the Faerie won’t wait for too long, and won’t care too much if Jaskier never returns, because he doesn’t want his friend to hurt.

A secret, selfish part of him hopes that the Faerie will be _distraught_ , that it won’t ever stop wondering about what happened to him, even long after Jaskier could ostensibly still be alive.

There’s another conspicuous _crack,_ this time closer, as whatever’s stalking them draws nearer. Jaskier hums a bit louder.

The trees are growing taller, and grimmer, Jaskier notes absently, and in the back of his mind his subconscious begins to compile rhymes and potential lyrics to describe his surroundings, even while his heart threatens to beat out of his chest and the reins in his hand grow slick with sweat. He whistles a bit louder still, grips the reins a bit tighter in his hand, and pretends he can hear birds overhead, joining in.

The trees are growing taller, and grimmer, and Jaskier tries not to look too closely at any of them, because he’s beginning to see faces and the outlines of creatures in the ridges of the bark, and the _last_ thing he needs is to fucking lose it because he saw a scary face in a _tree_. That is just not how he’s going to die. Devoured by a Faerie is a gruesome way to go, but at least it’s honest; and preferable to dying of apoplexy or _fright_ , because his eyes have begun playing tricks on him.

More branches snap. Jaskier switches from whistling to humming. The gelding dances behind him, frightened out of its mind, not wanting to go forward but terrified of being left behind.

The tension is palpable. Jaskier considers drawing his silver dagger, but honestly, he’s not sure how much good it will do. He prefers to die with a weapon in his hand than without, but if there’s even the _slimmest_ chance he might still get out of this alive, then drawing a weapon will certainly crush it by provoking the creature to attack him. He concentrates instead on the weight of the horseshoe in his pocket. It’s heavy iron, still studded with nails, and if he was quick enough it might do to daze a Faerie long enough to scramble onto the horse and run, lame leg be damned. He probably wouldn’t get very far on it, not with a thoroughbred’s naturally poor hooves and only three shoes between them over ground such as this, but it would be the _trying_ that counted.

There’s a _snap_ , and then a _crash!_ —and Jaskier leaps forward with an undignified yelp, hauling on the reins to drag the reluctant gelding with him, and the trees part and the ground flattens and there’s a gap in the canopy above where he can see the bright midday sky, and he heaves in a breath.

He’s alive. Still. He’s not sure why he’s alive, nor how long he’ll be alive _for_ , but he can certainly appreciate it while it lasts.

He takes a moment to look around. He’s in a clearing, of sorts, not very large—smaller in its entirety than the Faerie Ring, and shadowed by the canopy that stretches the perimeter above—and the sunlight on his face is more welcome that he could have thought possible.

The grass is lush, and the ground isn’t choked with mushrooms. The sentinel trees are young and green and it’s a good place to die, he thinks morbidly to himself. If he could which would be the last place he would ever see, it certainly wouldn’t be here, but… at least it’s beautiful.

He swallows past the ache in his throat and bitterly accepts his fate. He turns to bring his hand up and pet the horse’s soft muzzle, whispering a quick _thank you_ to the gelding for services rendered. The doesn’t allow himself to despair over the horse’s death—his own, he has to He doesn’t allow himself to be sad about it, because it’s a horse and there are plenty more of them and he never really took the time to bond with this one anyway, but he can feel regret that it never really got the chance to show him what it was capable of.

He scratches its soft nose once more, then turns to face the forest, and the creature of his destruction.

There’s a rustling across the clearing from him, and Jaskier watches the movement with curiosity and trepidation and the kind of bone-deep fear that would freeze you solid, if it was your first time feeling it. As it is, Jaskier and this sensation are old friends, so he merely shrugs off the icy clutches of terror along his spine, and keeps his eyes open.

A wolf walks into the clearing.

It… isn’t what he was expecting, obviously.

It’s unnaturally large and icy-white and terrifying. The tip of one of its ears is missing, presumably clawed away in some previous fight or other, though the mobility of the extremity isn’t apparently affected because both of the creature’s ears are pinned towards Jaskier. Golden eyes are transfixed upon Jaskier, cutting him to the bone, bright with something Jaskier can’t quite identify. If he had to guess… he’d say fury, and hunger, and a warmth that makes him feel rather inexplicably safe. _A trick_ , he thinks.

“Hello,” he greets the wolf politely, if somewhat faintly, because at this point his day can’t really get worse. He thinks he must have turned his ankle when he bolted forward, and just not noticed the pain at the occurrence, because it’s throbbing now and he wants to shift his weight uneasily under the heavy stare of the beast, but each twitch sends a jolt of pain up his leg and he doesn’t want to make himself seem more appetising, besides.

It just looks at him. Jaskier gets the feeling he’s being judged. If he were going to anthropomorphise this wolf, he’d say it looked exceedingly derisive.

It flicks its gaze somewhere off to Jaskier’s right—where the crash had come from, before. Jaskier sincerely hopes that that means he himself is _off_ the menu, and that the wolf has apparently been taken by a mad urge to fight one of the Fae ( _if it isn’t one of the Fae_ itself, he thinks sourly to himself), because he much prefers the odds of the wolf prevailing against the Fae against his own odds.

There’s an enraged wail, earsplittingly-high; Jaskier curses heartily at the sound of it, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest. The wolf barely reacts at all.

“Er—good luck,” Jaskier tells it, because he’s already greeted it and he might as well wish for it to triumph against whatever fucking monster decided to put Jaskier on the lunch menu for today.

It spares Jaskier another glance (this time indifferent), before loping off into the trees, rippling with muscle under its shaggy white coat, not too far off in height from the horse that quivers behind Jaskier. He releases a gusty sigh and slides to the ground, sitting hunched over with his head resting on his knees. His heart beats out a frantic rhythm. The gelding, now meek as a lamb as the two monsters apparently get farther away, bends its head, and contentedly begins to graze.

“I’m so fucked,” Jaskier says to it, because hearing the words out loud suddenly seems exceedingly important. The gelding flicks a disinterested ear. “I’m _so_ fucked.” Repetition does not provide any insight to his new predicament. He hadn’t particularly expected it to, but he’s still disappointed.

That wolf was fucking _huge_. Big enough to eat him whole, if so inclined; big enough to eat him _and his horse_ , with room for more. One of its paws had been bigger than two of Jaskier’s hands, probably, and he hadn’t missed the enormous claws tipping each pad. It had worn a nearly-human expression of intelligence and feigned disinterest and Jaskier flinches at the memory, wondering what _exactly_ it had been.

This day is really turning out to be a fucking nightmare.

…He’d felt _safe_ , though.

The forest around him suddenly goes silent.

It had been silent before, when he’d been stalked through the trees by whatever creature had sized him and his mount up and decided they’d make a tasty meal; the forest had been silent in the way that dead things are silent. Any noise suddenly became unnatural. The wind hadn’t whistled between the branches of the trees, and leaves had rustled silently against one another, and there had been a notable absence of creatures in undergrowth—he hadn’t even heard the small sounds that insects make, hidden in their burrows.

Jaskier hadn’t even noticed that noise had begun to return; he hadn’t noticed the cheerful, if faint, birdsong; he hadn’t noticed the movement of creatures crawling out of their holes and continuing about their day. He guesses it must have happened when the wolf had padded out before him, because he remembers how the animal’s terrific destruction of those branches had seemed so deafening against the absolute stillness. Now, the animals return and the world stops holding its breath, and the wind howls through the trees and Jaskier can hear himself breathe again.

Now, though, he notices when that cacophony of noise suddenly _stops_.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes, because he’s on a roll with acknowledging when situations are shit, today, and he doesn’t want to ruin his streak of it. Somewhere out there a dubiously-ordinary wolf and a probably-Faerie are sizing one another up, preparing to fight, and the woods is holding its breath in preparation, all noise swept away like leaves in the wind, to better hear the confrontation.

Suddenly, awfully, a roar splits the silence. Jaskier has never heard anything even _remotely_ like it. It’s a furious bellow, cracking through the forest like a thunderclap, and Jaskier feels the reverberations of it in his chest when he drops to the ground unconsciously. He couldn’t say if it came from the wolf or the maybe-Faerie. The gelding lifts its head, ears pricked, watching.

Another roar rips out from whatever monster is out there, and then there’s an answering snarl, and the distinct sound of trees being brought to the ground through pure force of will than any deforesting tools, and then the fight is _on_ , and Jaskier lurches to his feet to grab the gelding’s bridle in his hand before it bolts. He strokes a hand down its neck, unsure whether it’s for the animal’s comfort or for his.

The clamour is terrible, overwhelming. There’s snarling and yowling and screeching, noises Jaskier can’t imagine a wolf making, noises Jaskier can’t imagine a _Faerie_ making, except they are and there’s nothing he can do but wait for the victor to be decided.

He clenches his hands into fists, and prays to the gods he doesn’t really believe in any more, because if there’s _anything_ out there with _any_ kind of Grace, then he wants their blessing so he might have a chance of getting out of this.

The sounds of fighting grow louder, snarls and growls and cut-short roars and the unmistakeable sound of trees being caught in the crossfire, wood cracking and branches catching on the branches of neighbouring trees and tearing them down, too, as whole individuals go crashing to the ground, tearing up mud and grass and landing with a thunderclap.

He can’t really pinpoint the direction of the fight, but he hears when it moves around him— _all the way_ around him, as though the wolf is creating a shield around him and the Faerie is testing its defences. Jaskier wants to run, to take the gelding and get the fuck away—even if he only ends up getting _more lost_ —but the fight seems to surround him on all sides and he doesn’t see how he can get free.

Jaskier presses his forehead against the gelding’s, and wills for the gods to be on his side.

Something _screams_ , shrieking and shrill and awful, and then the sound is cut off with a wet crunch, and Jaskier prays to every god he can think of that he isn’t about to meet a similarly grisly end.

The silence is deafening. He shrinks beneath it, wondering if he should have mounted up and bolted already, wondering if there’s even any point. Wondering which creature he’s hoping has won. On the one hand, he always figured he’d go out via Fae, either at the end of a Faerie’s talons or fangs or under the impulsion of one. On the other hand… the wolf had made him feel _safe_ , as inexplicable and frightening as it is.

He and the gelding wait, side by side, wary and a little bit terrified, and Jaskier breathes a sigh of relief when the wolf pads back into the clearing, bloodied and apparently victorious. It looks like something huge and furious raked a clawed hand down its ribs, rending the flesh and turning the snow-white fur a bloody red, and it’s not-quite-limping as it fixes him with that weirdly penetrating stare.

“I don’t know why I think I can trust you, but… thank you,” he says to it, glad that there’s nobody else about to watch him talk to a _wolf,_ of all things.

The wolf opens its mouth and yawns, pink tongue lolling out, showing rows of serrated fangs and an alarming amount of gristle stuck between some of them that Jaskier does his best not to gawk at. The wolf twists and scratches behind its ear with a hind leg, looking gloriously unperturbed.

High above them, a bird calls out; another sings back, and they carry the harmony for several moments. Against his better judgement, Jaskier finds himself relaxing.

Abruptly, the wolf turns and trots back toward the treeline.

He watches it go with rising trepidation. Is this a trick? Is it about to turn around and attack him? _Why is he not running yet?_

The beast stops at the edge of the small clearing, turns to appraise Jaskier over its shoulder, and then continues on into the foliage.

Getting the hint (or, perhaps, just projecting), Jaskier follows.

* * *

So, he’s avoided certain death at the hands of one Faerie stalking him through the trees, only to follow a _massive fuck-off wolf_ through the forest instead. He’s beginning to wonder if this is all some enormous joke and he’s about to stumble into a gathering of people, his family included, holding banners and throwing confetti and proclaiming, _ha ha, we got you!_

Somehow, this theory feels more plausible than what he suspects is _actually_ going on, which is that this wolf is a familiar of some description of the white-haired, golden-eyed Faerie he met in the Faerie Ring.

 _This is the most insane thing that has happened to me_ , he thinks sourly to himself, well-aware that it isn’t _much more_ unbelievable than all of the other things that have happened to him.

Jaskier mulls this over as he stumbles through the forest, following the wolf at a pace far faster than he’s comfortable with over such awful ground. His ankle throbs dully, protesting each step with shooting pains that force out hissed exhalations of discomfort between his teeth, and there’s a twinging ache in his back that suggests he’s managed to strain something. The gelding, despite only having shoes on three feet and also being a lot bigger and less manoeuvrable than Jaskier, doesn’t seem to be having any trouble.

“Do you think you could slow down?” Jaskier finally calls, swallowing his pride (and why does he care? It’s a _wolf._ Who is it going to tell?) to admit that he needs a break.

The wolf turns to appraise him, and then plants its ass on the ground and closes its eyes. Jaskier shoots it a bitter scowl, working to get his breathing and moving to sit against a nearby tree, trying in vain to get his breathing under control while also maintaining an aura of collectedness. He keeps the reins in his hands, and closes his eyes when the gelding steps over to him, snuffling against his hair and huffing hot breaths against his face.

“We’ve still got to get home, after this,” Jaskier murmurs to it. The horse doesn’t seem particularly concerned.

The wolf lets out a low _boof_ , then; it’s not quite a bark, and Jaskier presses his lips together _hard_ to stop from grinning at the noise, similar as it is to one of the enormous livestock-guarding dogs they keep, and the noises that they make while rounding up the sheep; careful and cautious, yet commanding.

“We have to go?” he asks, wondering why the hell he’s even bothering to talk to the wolf when it’s not like it’s going to _reply,_ and the wolf yawns again before pointedly standing and turning. With a quiet sigh Jaskier hauls himself to his feet. He knows very well that his pains aren’t going to magically heal themselves with a few minutes of sitting down; the sooner he leaves the sooner he can deal with them.

The wolf doesn’t seem to care as it vanishes into the trees.

* * *

By the time Jaskier is led into the clearing where the _gloriously familiar_ Faerie Ring lies, he’s about ready to lie down and weep. He’s shaking from the waning adrenaline of the attack and the exhaustion from the walk, and he’s got a long walk yet to get back to the manor.

The sun is steadily dropping towards the horizon, casting a little shade into the clearing, and Jaskier seeks it out gratefully, glad not to have the heat on him after the gruelling hike. He ties up the gelding, grabs his food from the saddlebags, and flops down unceremoniously into the grass.

He’s never moving again.

He does have to sit up to eat, but he manages it with minimal cursing and a kind of undignified roll-and-twist, and he’s never been so glad to find the Circle empty of its usual Faerie inhabitant. This doesn’t need _witnesses_.

The wolf has disappeared, too, and Jaskier can’t help but feel a little forlorn. His skill at holding conversations with creatures that don’t talk back has improved greatly, and he’d found the creature to be good company.

It probably has wolf-things to do, though. Hunting, or sleeping. Finding its pack, if it has one, though now that Jaskier thinks about it he doesn’t think he’s heard any reports of wolves around Lettenhove—he thinks the Faeries had eaten them all, early on. He shakes his head, trying to dispel the thoughts of the mysterious white wolf, and instead fixes his gaze on the progression of the sun, wondering how much time he has.

His eyes threaten to slide closed; he wants to sleep.

He doesn’t, because he’ll be late enough back already without dozing off, but it’s a close thing. In the end, he doesn’t even pick up the lute left for him as usual in the Faerie Ring; he just flicks through his notebook and reads through what he’s written, making adjustments where he thinks they’ll work and feeling vaguely dissatisfied with those he doesn’t manage to edit.

By the time he admits to himself that neither the Faerie nor the wolf are going to make another appearance, Jaskier’s muscles are complaining emphatically and he curses to himself in three different languages as he hauls himself to his feet, legs wobbling just a little before he balances himself.

This walk home is going to be _miserable_.


	7. Chapter 7

Spring is reluctantly folding into summer, the days growing longer and warmer and the melancholy of the winter being thoroughly routed from the estate. Lettenhove is suddenly rushed off its feet in preparation for the celebration of the solstice. It’s a novel feeling. In previous years, the celebration had been largely unremarkable: it’s an old holiday, and not particularly observed in these parts.

 _This_ year, however, the villagers have decided that midsummer is a perfect excuse for a celebration, which everybody is apparently starved of and it’s a huge oversight that the last party they’d had was for _midwinter_. Jaskier gets himself thoroughly reprimanded by the small handful of village women, who refuse to hear his objections that it’s Marek they should be shouting at, not him, and only after they have secured his promise that next year both the spring equinox _and_ Beltane will be observed do they finally leave him alone, unsure as to what just happened.

He finds he can’t _really_ complain. Celebrating is good for the soul, or something, and he knows it will be good for all of them to spend one day getting drunk and enjoying themselves.

The solstice isn’t for weeks, and yet the villagers are throwing themselves into the preparations for it with a nearly religious zeal. It’s difficult not to be swept up in it. Somehow, he finds himself in Lettenhove’s musty old library, sadly neglected in recent years—its most common occupants had been Joanna (his mother had loved this room for its huge windows, now covered in grime, and the escape that all of these books provided), Jaskier himself, and occasionally Juliusz. Of the three, one is dead, one incarcerated for his safety with his _own_ supply of books, and the other spends all his free time in the forest with a Faerie.

Needless to say, everything is coated in a thick layer of dust.

The villagers are adamant they have a midsummer celebration, so Jaskier has somehow been put to work researching old customs of the festival. Leafing through ancient tomes written in a dialect that hasn’t been spoken in a hundred or so years and speaking of dancing and delicacies isn’t exactly how Jaskier had imagined he’d be spending his morning, but he doesn’t have a good enough reason to say no that isn’t _because I’ll miss my Faerie_ , so he takes to the work with a scowl but few outright complaints.

Nobody said it out loud, but he’s also supposed to be making sure they don’t accidentally invite a horde of Faeries to join the celebration. Jaskier thinks it unlikely that they’d manage it—but he can’t imagine not at least _checking_ that they won’t.

He’s yet to find any mention of the Fae in any of the books. He _does_ have a small stack of neatly compiled notes detailing how the solstice had been celebrated previously, and he has a headache, and there’s an ink smudge on his thumb that is still wet and he thinks he might have just smeared it over one of his brows, while trying to assuage aforementioned headache.

There’s giggling from the door. Jaskier looks up, irritable at being interrupted, to find Hanna leaning against the doorframe, a hand covering her smirk, eyes full of mirth.

“What?” he snaps, narrowing his eyes at her unrepentant glare.

She grins. “You’re _covered_ in ink.” Ah; it’s worse than he thought, then.

He glares at her a moment longer, then heaves a sigh and puts down his quill. Unthinkingly, he scrubs a hand over his face, rubbing his tired eyes, and from the next bout stifled laughter, realises that he has managed to smear the ink further. He tries not to think about it.

He must look sufficiently pitiful for his sister to feel some modicum of sympathy, because she scrunches her nose at him and says, “come get lunch with me.”

Lunch. He could do with lunch. He hadn’t realised until now how _hungry_ he is—why does this always happen to him? “Lunch,” he agrees aloud with her, all his mental faculties now zeroed in on the prospect of food, his research totally forgotten.

She laughs at him again, teasing, and asks, “were you this useless at Oxenfurt?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a reply.

* * *

_Lunch_ finds Jaskier in the kitchen with their older sister Gabriela, who puts away enough food that Jaskier is left staring at her in awe, desperately trying not to blurt out that the only other person he’s seen eat that much food was a Faerie.

Unfortunately, she catches him staring, and before he can even say anything she defensively snaps, “what? I’m eating for two.” And then she starts crying.

Gabriela is heavily pregnant. It seems to be taking its toll.

Jaskier continues eating his sandwich before she can ask for the rest of it. By the counter to his left, Hanna is similarly devouring her own; Gabriela has this uncanny ability to ask for some of somebody’s lunch or dinner and then somehow end up with the whole thing, and Jaskier has no defences against it. He loves his sister, he really does, but he needs to eat too.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she confesses between half-choked sobs, with Jaskier gingerly pats her shoulder while stuffing the rest of the bread into his mouth with the other, and shoots panicked looks at Hanna, who soundly ignores them both.

He casts his mind about for something to say. “It’s because the baby’s crying, Jaskier settles on, telling her with the straightest face he can manage. “So obviously you’re crying.”

Gabriela actually nods at this, looking miserably down at her empty plate, before she furrows her brows and looks up at him sharply. Behind her Hanna has begun silently snickering to herself, and Jaskier forces himself not to look at his younger sister’s face, else he’ll lose his composure and begin laughing too. Maybe it’s mean, but it’s _good natured_ ribbing.

“Jaskier—” she begins uncertainly, her face creased with such worry that Jaskier can’t hold it in any longer and bursts out laughing despite himself, an ugly snort ripping from his throat. Quickly it devolves into the kind of laughter that bubbles over when things have been too tense for too long with too little relief.

“I’m—sorry—“ he gasps out, tears on his cheeks, but Gabriela is waving him away with laughter of her own, Hanna guffawing beside them both, and it takes a good few minutes for any of them to calm down long enough to look at one another without dissolving into fits.

“Fucking _hell_ , Jaskier,” Gabriela sniffs, wiping at her eyes. “I can’t believe—”

“I can’t believe _you believed him_ ,” Hanna interrupts her. “You’re training as a healer! A midwife! What—”

“He just said it so sincerely,” Gabriela defends, “and I didn’t hear _you_ contradicting him.”

“Yeah, because I wanted to see how long it’d take before you got it.”

“Excuses,” Gabriela accuses.

“You’re all laughing!” a small voice exclaims then before it can come to blows between his two sisters, accompanied by a tugging on Jaskier’s sleeves.

He looks down to see Zofia with a hand on his arm, looking up at all of them with wide eyes and a mischievous grin. “Was there a joke?”

Jaskier smiles down indulgently at her, then reaches down to pull her into his lap. She’s nearly two, or thereabouts, and getting bigger now, but she’s still _tiny._ She giggles, wriggling to get comfortable, poking with a disappointed air at his empty plate, and then waves at Gabriela.

“I was just making fun of Gabriela for something, Zoey,” Jaskier tells her. He strokes a hand over her hair, which needs washing and probably cutting, or at least braiding so it doesn’t get so tangled. She squirms around to look up at him, and frowns, obviously displeased.

“You shouldn’t make fun of people, Jask’,” she scolds him in her tiny child’s voice, and Jaskier nods at her, suppressing a smile. He should probably be setting a good example here; he tries for a serious expression, and judging by the dubious look she throws him he thinks he must just look a bit mad.

“Yeah, c’mon, Jask’,” Hanna laughs. “Stop making fun of people.”

Rather than answer her, Jaskier summons the nastiest, toothiest smile he can manage and directs all of its striking power at his sister, who rolls her eyes at him, unbothered.

 _Where_ is Marek when you need him. Jaskier has too many sisters and too few brothers to be on his side.

“If you’re all going to gang up on me, I’m going to get back to work,” he complains, and Zofia giggles and squirms in his lap before wriggling out of his hold and heading for Hanna, already crumpling her face to beg for sweets.

“Guess Zofia doesn’t care,” Gabriela grins, watching their younger sister unsuccessfully attempt to cajole Hanna into sacrificing some of her sweet roll.

“I’ll see you later,” Jaskier sighs, depositing his plate on the side when Hanna offers to clean it for him. He leaves, heading for the library again; he really does need to get back to work.

* * *

Jaskier _does_ end up finding something interesting about the Faeries, hidden amongst the stacks of books.

In one musty old tome with only one word out of five of the title being legible—“Faery”—and the rest of the gilded letters faded so badly that Jaskier can only guess at the age of the book, he finds mention of the Faerie Rings. In the author’s long-winded and meandering way, the book manages to convey that on the summer solstice, when the earth is soaked in the sun’s rays and the magic on the earth is strongest, the influence of the night at its weakest, the Faerie Rings will open and release their captives into the world, to cavort and play as they like for as long as the sun is above the horizon.

It’s all very mystical and Jaskier takes it with an entire handful of salt, but it’s also the only mention of Faeries he finds anywhere in any of the books. Obviously, Faeries must have never paid much attention to midsummer; from Jaskier’s own experience and the irritatingly vague wording in _Faery_ , he surmises that the Fae aren’t very fond of direct, bright sunlight—something about their eyes, he can only assume, that are perfect for stalking their prey through the filtered light of the forests and turn glassy and mirrored when light shines directly on them, and seem sensitive to too much sunlight.

He wonders if his own Faerie would tell him. Probably not.

Jaskier begrudgingly spends a further few hours sifting through increasingly irrelevant tomes for any further mention of the Fae, but ultimately, he finds nothing more of substance and is able to hand over his notes the next day with ill-concealed relish.

The village women thank him profusely and set about pouring over his careful handwriting almost immediately, barely even glancing up when he bids them goodbye. He leaves them to it before he can get roped into researching anything else absolutely inane.

The day is bright and the sun blazing overhead, a little warmer than ordinary for spring, but not unwelcome after the recent rains that have turned the grounds into something more akin to a swamp. Jaskier figures that now is as good a time as any to have a ride down to the Faerie Ring, see if his Faerie is there.

When Jaskier reaches the barn, he finds it blessedly empty of people, with only the quiet sounds of a dozen horses steadily munching on their hay to fill the silence. He tacks up quickly and rides out without so much as a backwards glance, eager to forget the stifling closeness of the library.

* * *

Today, the Faerie is there to greet him, sprawled dramatically out on the strange blue grass and steadfastly ignoring Jaskier’s horse as it crashes into the clearing, clearly still distraught—it had encountered a bird bursting out of the undergrowth about a mile back, and had spooked, hard.

“Nice ride?” it asks, the corners of its lips curving into the very tiniest smile, so Jaskier can’t even be upset over the teasing. It’s a little disconcerting, he will admit, what with the fangs and the curved horns that churn furrows into the ground where the Faerie tilts its head to regard Jaskier, golden eyes warm and mischievous. Jaskier wonders when the Faerie began to regard _him_ as a friend, too.

“Fuck off,” Jaskier grumbles half-heartedly—he still has a _reputation_ to maintain, after all—and the Faerie’s grin widens nearly imperceptibly.

He considers broaching the topic of midsummer then and there, but there’s a looseness to the Faerie’s limbs that Jaskier likes looking at and doesn’t want to ruin immediately, so he instead pulls a bottle and two cups from his saddlebags and offers, “wine?”

* * *

Most of the bottle is gone by the time Jaskier finishes summarising a play he’d watched while studying at Oxenfurt, that had been so awful he’s never been able to forget it. The plot was unintelligible, the characters insubstantial, and the actors so obviously aware of the material’s multiple shortcomings that they hurt to watch. The least painful aspect of the whole sorry affair had been the antagonist’s actor showing up to the performance blind-drunk, who clearly couldn’t have given less of a shit and was, in fact, having the time of their life. He’s seen better performances from Zofia, lying about something she’d broken and tried to hide.

“Why the fuck did you stay for the whole thing?” the Faerie asks, baffled.

“There were free drinks afterwards,” Jaskier admits, pouring the last of the wine into his glass and taking a fortifying gulp.

“Were they worth it?”

Jaskier frowns. “Y’know, I don’t remember that part.”

The Faerie snorts, and downs the rest of its wine in one long swallow. Jaskier watches its throat work for several heartbeats too long before flushing and averting his gaze. “Seems it wasn’t worth it if the only part you remember is the actual play.”

Jaskier nods in agreement. “I tell you what, though,” he starts, the wine loosening his tongue, “if you asked me today if I wanted to go back to Oxenfurt and watch that whole play again, without even the free drinks afterwards, I’d say yes before you could finish asking.”

The Faerie chews on this silently for a moment. “Can think of a lot of places I’d rather be, right now,” it says quietly, and this is the _first time_ that either of them have made mention of the fact that the Faerie is stuck here, too. Jaskier holds his breath, unwilling to risk this new forthrightness. “Can’t say that watching the worst play in history is very high on the list, though.”

“Oh, definitely not.” Jaskier wracks his brain, thinking, and then offers, “I used to want to be a bard.”

The Faerie hums. Jaskier’s mentioned this before, he thinks, but he’s never really… spoken about it.

“Yeah, I had all these _plans_. I was going to go travelling. See more of the Continent. I wanted to sing for people, and play my lute—I played a few times at Oxenfurt, and once when I was riding back to Lettenhove I played in a tavern, and it was just— _so much fun_ , and I like people and I’m good at talking to them and I was ready to do it. And then I got… kind of stuck at Lettenhove, for a while, and then—well. I’m not going anywhere now.”

He hasn’t really mentioned to his siblings about any of this—that he’d had _ambitions_ , and dreams, and now he was never going to see them to fruition. It stings, still, though the intervening months have soothed the pain somewhat.

“I used to travel a lot,” the Faerie offers suddenly, and Jaskier holds his tongue before he can blurt something stupid like, _looking like that?_ “I think you’d have liked it,” it continues, and Jaskier smiles unwillingly at the half-compliment.

“You could tell me more about it, sometime,” he grins at the Faerie, and it’s maybe a pained grin but it’s amicable, too. The Faerie _has_ told him stories, of things it’s seen and done, but they were the kinds of stories that painted small pictures, not big ones. Stories about innkeeps and stableboys and veteran soldiers; important, of course, but Jaskier wants to hear about war and death and glory, kings and coronations and weddings the whole Continent received invitations to. He wants to hear about the times the Faerie was at an event and thought to itself, _history will remember this._

“Maybe I will,” the Faerie says, but its eyes are drawn to something in the middle-distance, looking without seeing and probably lost in thought, or memories, and far away from where the two of them are sat.

Sensing the conversation has waned, Jaskier pulls his notebook closer to him and readies his quill. The last few lines of the song he’s currently working on had led him to a stalemate while he grappled with writer’s block, but if he changes _these_ lyrics and swaps that rhyme there—

Before he notices, an hour has passed, the quiet of the clearing broken only by the scratching of Jaskier’s quill, the quiet chewing of his horse as it grazes nearby, the distant calling of birds to one another. He never realised how content he could be, just sitting quietly in another’s presence—he’d always had to fill the silence with something, even if he’d just been rambling about absolutely nothing. But with the Faerie… it’s nice.

“You wanted to be a bard,” the Faerie says suddenly, and Jaskier’s hand jerks in surprise and sends ink splattering across his writing. It hasn’t _ruined_ it, per se, but he sighs and gingerly dabs at the paper with his sleeve, trying to wipe away some of the ink before it dries.

“Uh, yeah,” he answers distractedly, wondering if he should just rewrite the whole thing again. Probably not. Paper is kind of a limited resource, now.

“And now you don’t.” It isn’t phrased as a question, and it confuses Jaskier.

“I mean—I just don’t see the point in wanting something that can _literally_ never happen,” he points out, and the Faerie hums softly.

“Songbird,” it says, and its voice is so, _so_ gentle, and Jaskier knows immediately that he won’t like whatever is coming next. “What is it you _want_?”

He’s never thought about it. He doesn’t think about it now. “For someone to take me away,” he says immediately, like the words have been brewing inside him and only now had the chance to burst forth, and he flinches at the ugly sound of them, the longing and the despair for things that could never happen. The Faerie looks equally nonplussed.

Silence falls between them, and this time, it isn’t companionable and comfortable and easy. It’s tense, and Jaskier tries not to shudder under the weight of it, bearing him down and nudging him to say things he doesn’t want to confess.

“The summer solstice is approaching,” he blurts, for lack of anything better to say and desperate to break the stalemate. The words are ungainly and not at all conveying the message he’d wanted them to. He takes a breath, and says, “I’m—I don’t know if I’ll be able to come see you that day.”

He turns his head away, not wanting to meet the Faerie’s gaze. Afraid of what he might see there.

After several long, horribly tense moments, the Faerie clears its throat and says, “perhaps you will, anyway.”

It’s a sufficiently vague response that Jaskier can’t be _certain_ that his point was made, but the words are said pointedly enough to give him hope that the legend is true, and he might be able to see his friend elsewhere than this godsbedamned clearing.

Jaskier is suddenly _terrified_.

* * *

He tries to put his potentially-fatal mistake out of his mind over the next few days, concentrating instead on assisting with the preparations and pestering the festival committee into giving him things to do until everyone including himself is sick of him, and then the universe blesses him with something to keep him busy.

Juliusz is getting worse.

“My Lord, his Lordship hasn’t eaten in two days, sir. The trays are always full when we go to collect them.” Ana, a young woman from the village with no family left and little appetite for physical labour in the fields, is wringing her hands with distress as she tells Jaskier of his father’s condition.

Despite his frequent urgings to the contrary, Ana refuses to address Jaskier by his name, and only becomes more obstinate the more he asks her. Referring to Juliusz as _‘his Lordship_ ’ is new, and Jaskier knows when to concede defeat before she starts referring to Jaskier as ‘your Excellency’, or something.

“Has he spoken at all?” Jaskier asks, following her through the manor to the entrance of Juliusz’ wing. It looks cold and forbidding despite being physically no different to any other entrances in the building.

“No, sir,” she says, and Jaskier marvels at the worry evident in her voice. How anybody can worry for a man like his father is beyond him. Jaskier certainly doesn’t; he worries about the viability of keeping him contained long-term, and he worries about Zofia growing up without any parents, and he worries that Juliusz will grow violent and harm the skeleton crew of staff that keep the manor in shape. He doesn’t worry _for his father_ , though, because the raving, sick man behind that door isn’t the father that Jaskier grew up with—and they’ve never been on good terms regardless.

Maybe that makes him a bad person. He’s not so sure that matters anymore, when the world is overrun with monsters.

Jaskier regards the door for a moment, before his hands tighten into fists and he sighs. Ana shoots him a worried glance, he ignores it, and they both stand in silence for a moment longer before he makes a decision.

“I need to talk to him,” he says quietly. Ana sucks in a breath, but doesn’t contradict him, which means she thinks he needs to as well but hadn’t wanted to bring it up herself. Smart girl. If the world hadn’t gone to shit, she’d have done very well for herself in the household staff, Jaskier thinks almost absently to himself.

The last time he saw his father was when the man had nearly killed Zofia, before Jaskier had to knock him down. Since then he’s only spoken with Juliusz through the door; he knows that Gabriela and Marek have both sat to dinner with him a handful of times, but Hanna and himself never had the inclination. They’ve kept Zofia away from him.

If it turns into a fight, Jaskier would win. There’s no question; he’s won before, and he’s been having regularl, healthy meals and keeps fit by working the horses every day; Juliusz hasn’t eaten for two days and lives his life languishing in a padded prison. He doesn’t _want_ to fight his father. He does need to be prepared, though.

“Can you fetch Marek?” he asks Ana, figuring that if this turns into a case of dealing with _emotions_ rather than physical violence, then it would be good to have somebody on hand who doesn’t mind talking to Juliusz.

“Jaskier—” Ana starts, breaking a months-long habit of never, ever using his first name, and Jaskier smiles at her.

“It’ll be fine,” he says, as reassuringly as he can. “I’ll be fine. Please just fetch my brother.”

Ana hesitates, then says, “yes, sir,” and hurries away. At least she didn’t curtsy.

Jaskier regards the door before him, then takes the key from his pocket and unlocks it, before shoving it open and stepping through.

Inside, is—

 _Carnage_ , would be a fair word for it.

They’re in Juliusz’ front room, fashioned so he can eat his meals and receive guests there without having to bring them further into his sanctuary. The rooms beyond this one include a library, a bedroom, and a washroom that adjoins to this one, which a servant hauls water up to once a day.

The rooms had been comfortably furnished, and Juliusz had been given his personal library from the master rooms of the house that he had previously occupied—several hundred books (Jaskier had checked) to keep him occupied.

Not occupied enough, apparently, because Juliusz sits grinning in the corner of this room, his eyes closed in deranged bliss, blood smeared across one cheekbone, surrounded by the destruction he has apparently wrought.

“I couldn’t find her.” It takes Jaskier a moment to realise it had been Juliusz who spoke. He ignores him in favour of further surveying the damage.

The great wooden table lays on its side, one of its legs somehow snapped off, and Jaskier can’t immediately spot where it has gone in the surrounding chaos. The four chairs that accompanied it are in their own varying states of ruin: one of them survived with only the back broken off, resulting in a new, somewhat splintery stool, while the worst off seems to have been broken down to the individual pieces of wood that were nailed together, some of which had, somehow, been further shredded apart.

They’re _solid oak._ How had his father managed all of this? Without anybody hearing, no less?

Beyond the centre of the room lies a pile of shredded fabric that takes Jaskier a moment to identify as the drapes, meant to hang across the windows. They’ve been slashed to ribbons.

Does Juliusz have a knife? Jaskier fucking hopes not—he’d ordered only the bluntest utensils be given to him, and if his unstable father has a _knife_ then he’d much rather not be in this room alone with him.

The armchairs that had been positioned around a low table in the corner have been hacked at, with a fury that makes Jaskier gulp to see their shredded corpses. The stuffing thickly coats the floor like a carpet of snow, the fabric hanging in tatters off the wooden skeletons of the chairs, which also sport what at first glance look like the marks of a great cat, sharpening its claws on them.

He doesn’t inspect the rest of the rooms. He needs to secure Juliusz. He needs Marek here.

“I couldn’t _find her_ , Julian,” Juliusz speaks again, and Jaskier turns to appraise him with some trepidation. He doesn’t bother correcting his father; his name became a point of contention between them years ago, and they’ve quarrelled about it ever since.

“Who?” he wets his lips enough to ask, his voice hoarse to his own ears.

Juliusz chuckles quietly to himself, and Jaskier is seized by the sudden urge to grab his father by the shoulders and slap him until he’s _here_ , in the present, not lost in whatever fantasy world he’s built to escape the this one.

He doesn’t.

“ _Who_ , Juliusz?” he asks quietly instead, watching his father’s face as dozens of emotions flash across, too many to quantify, too many to understand even a little bit of what Juliusz is thinking, too many to believe that his father is sane. He’s _struggling_ , it’s so obvious, and Jaskier hardens his heart against it because _now isn’t the time_.

“Joanna,” Juliusz finally rasps, after far too many minutes of silence. “She’s not _here_. Where have you put her?”

Oh, but this is awful. His father had always been enormous, and powerful, and to see him so reduced is more jarring than Jaskier had expected it would be.

“She’s dead,” he says, not willing to censor the truth nor look after his father’s feelings.

“No,” Juliusz denies, shaking his head far more vehemently than the softly-spoken word had really warranted. “No, she can’t be. I _heard_ her. I thought it was coming from outside, but then I’m _sure_ I saw her walk these halls, into this room, and I—I looked, but—”

“She’s _dead_ , Juliusz. You attended the funeral.” Jaskier is suddenly so, so tired of this. Where’s Marek?

“ _No_ , I saw her,” Juliusz denies, abruptly snapping his head up to capture his son’s gaze with a look so piercing that Jaskier can’t help but shiver under the weight of it. “She’s _here_. I saw her. Why are you lying to me?”

Jaskier stares at his father. The blood on his cheekbone is dry, and he can’t see any cuts there, and then he looks down at his father’s hands and—yeah. Smashing apart a room would probably go a long way towards slicing your hands open.

As gently as he’s able, with his emotions tightly in check, he crosses the room to squat in front of his father, and holds his hands out. Juliusz takes them, and Jaskier winces at the blood and the filth, before standing and pulling his father after him.

“Let’s clean you up,” he murmurs, and Juliusz doesn’t say a word. He follows Jaskier into the washroom without complaint, meek as a lamb, and says nothing when Jaskier wrings the cloth out over the basin and begins to dab at his hands, cleaning the muck away.

He never wanted to be this close to his father again. But Jaskier can recognise when somebody’s in pain, and there’s nobody else here to do it, and he isn’t a _heartless monster_ , so he can be gentle for a little while and then he can ride out into the forest and scream his frustration.

It’s another few minutes before Jaskier hears the door opening in the other room, and Marek’s sharp intake of breath.

“We’re in here,” he calls, not so loud as to cause Juliusz to flinch but loud enough that the man straightens where he’s sat, pulled out of his reverie.

“Jaskier, what the _fuck—”_ Marek begins, and cuts himself off abruptly when he walks into the washroom and takes in the scene before him.

Jaskier supposes it _is_ a little unusual. Juliusz perched on the edge of the tub, holding his hands out to his son who cradles them with a gentleness his father had never showed him, wiping away blood and picking out splinters and speaking softly.

“Oh!” Jaskier hadn’t noticed Ana until she squeaks, taking in Juliusz’ state, and he catches Marek’s gaze and hands over the tending of his father to her capable hands before following his brother into the front room, wincing again at the wreckage. Somehow it looks worse than before.

“Does the rest look like this?” Marek asks, and Jaskier has to shake his head and say he doesn’t know. “We’ll go have a look, then.”

The other rooms are startlingly untouched. The discrepancy between the utter madness of the first room and the mundanity of the rest is almost more alarming than if the other rooms had been subjected to the same treatment; by the wide-eyed looks that Marek keeps shooting him as they make their rounds, he agrees.

“What the fuck do we do?” his brother asks quietly. Jaskier shakes his head; he forgets, sometimes, that Marek is younger than him.

“We’ll clean out the front room. And we’ll have to keep a closer eye on him. What I really want to know is how the fuck he managed all of that without anyone _hearing_ him, or the servants who bring him his meals noticing.”

Marek nods, expression twisted into something Jaskier can’t put a name to but feels like he understands anyway—he’s known for a long time that the father they’d had is long gone, but he suspects that Marek might only now be realising this.

They return to the washroom, to find Marek with wrapped knuckles and Ana sat against the wall on the other side of the room from him, holding a knife Jaskier’s never seen before between her hands, her face as white as a sheet.

Marek freezes beside him, so it’s up to Jaskier to unstick his tongue and ask, in the steadiest voice he can manage, “what happened?”

Ana doesn’t look at him as she says, “he called me Joanna. He told me I was dead, that I _should_ be dead. Told me he’d fix it. Then he brought the knife out.” She doesn’t elaborate, and Jaskier doesn’t ask; rather, he walks over to her and drops to his knees and takes her hands in his.

“I’m so, _so_ sorry,” he murmurs. Her breath hitches, but she nods. “You should—you can go, if you like.” He doesn’t want to order her around.

Marek is talking quietly to Juliusz, who looks unconvinced by whatever his brother his saying—but he’s not paying any attention to Ana, which is what Jaskier wanted.

“I’ll go fetch some of the men. To help with the mess… and him,” she says, her eyes flicking over to where Marek and Juliusz are, and they soften just a fraction before finding Jaskier’s gaze again.

She feels _sorry_ for him, he realises, and he feels a sudden burst of affection for her that wars with the bloom of shame that threatens to encapsulate him. This random woman—almost a stranger, and she would have been, had the Fae invasion not fundamentally changed the way the world works—has such a capacity for forgiveness that Jaskier feels humbled by it.

He wonders, not for the first time—and certainly not for the last—just when he’d gotten so bitter.

“Thank you, Ana,” he says quietly, rising and stepping back so she can get to her feet. He accepts the knife—a dagger, where the _fuck_ had Juliusz gotten a dagger?—and nods to her.

“I’ll just be a moment, sir,” she winks at him, and he knows that she’ll be alright.

* * *

“Aye, nobody brought him a meal this morning,” the chef tells him, frowning. “We wanted you to know about what was going on, first, with him. Last time anyone was in that room was yesterday evening, no earlier nor later than usual, and the boy tells me he didn’t see anything amiss. Didn’t leave anything but the tray, didn’t see Juliusz, didn’t see Juliusz when he went back an hour later to collect the empty tray and brought it back full.”

“So he had all night,” Jaskier murmurs to himself, drumming his fingers on the table as he thinks. The chef watches him with a curious expression that Jaskier doesn’t see, and quickly wipes it away when Jaskier looks up to meet his gaze. “Do you know if anybody… heard anything? I just don’t understand how he could smash apart an entire _room_ and nobody knew.”

The chef winces, and confesses, “nobody was near the rooms last night. We’ve—er. We’ve set up a bit of a still—just a small one, mind!—in one of the cellars, and the lads wanted to try some of it. We can, um—”

Jaskier smiles. “I think I’d like to try some, too, if you don’t mind. We’re going to run out of alcohol sooner or later; we should get the recipe down before that happens. I just want to know if anyone heard anything, that’s all.”

The chef’s shoulders slump in relief. “No, sir. Nothing.”

Jaskier dismisses him, and sits back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table again. After a moment Marek reaches over and places his hand over his brother’s, stopping the motion (and the noise), and Jaskier shoots him an apologetic look before withdrawing his hand and replacing it in his lap.

“His rooms are on the other side of the manor to ours,” Marek points out.

“Yeah,” Jaskier agrees; he’s been running it over in his mind, wondering if they were far enough away to mask all of _that_.

“I mean, what else could it be?”

That’s the crux of the problem: Jaskier doesn’t know _what_ he’s thinking. Why else wouldn’t he have heard what was going on in Juliusz’ rooms? Did he really believe there was magic at play?

 _Faeries_ , a tiny voice at the back of his mind whispered, and he shied away from the thought. No.

The manor was fully warded.

The children had been taken from a fully warded manor, in those first few weeks, and nobody had seen or heard them go.

Jaskier scrubs a hand over his face, and wonders, not for the first time, how the fuck all of this is supposed to _end._


	8. Chapter 8

Jaskier hates the summer.

He is not built to thrive in such _sweltering_ heat as the Redanian summers bring. No human is, he’s sure, and he regards anybody who doesn’t spend at least an hour of their day complaining about the intense heat with extreme scrutiny. Summer brings insects, too—hordes and hordes of them, and they wait until the cooler evenings to swarm you and they _bite,_ and Jaskier would never leave the house again, just to avoid them, if he wasn’t sure that it would drive him insane.

He’s been experimenting with napping during the hottest hours of the day, which has been working quite successfully for him—except for the fact that he keeps being reprimanded by people who have no business reprimanding him.

He complains as much to Gabriela, sweating next to him beneath the enormous old oak tree they’ve appropriated for the afternoon, overlooking a meadow of horses and sheep. She hums noncommittedly.

He glares up at the sun. “And there’s no clouds,” he continues, because this is a point that has been bothering for some time now. “Why the _fuck_ are there no clouds? You know in the spring, when there are those days when it’s freezing in the shade and lovely in the sunshine, and all you want is for the clouds to go away? I take it back. I _love_ the clouds. I think—”

“—that clouds are great, yes, we all heard,” Gabriela interrupts, her voice mild, belied by the scowl that darkens her features even more than the bags beneath her eyes and her lustreless hair. She looks worse than she had a week ago, and Jaskier has half a mind to hunt her husband down and have a word with him about taking on more of the child rearing duties, because whatever arrangement they have at the moment clearly isn’t working.

“You look like shit,” he tells her, because she made fun of him a few weeks ago when he was helping with the lambing and had placenta in his hair. The glare she directs at him could have scalded him had it not been ruined by an inopportunely-timed yawn.

“Not a word,” she warns, cracking her jaw as she yawns again. Jaskier just grins at her. “Newborns are _exhausting_.”

“Oh, I remember,” he tells her. “Remember Zofia? Most awful baby I’ve ever dealt with.”

“She’s the _only_ baby you’ve ever dealt with.”

“Not true! I kind of remember when Hanna was just born. Granted I didn’t really have to deal with her as a newborn, but it was my solemn duty as an older brother to bully her until she was big enough to fight back, so I know _exactly_ where you’re coming from—”

“I swear to the gods, Jaskier, I will _hit you with your lute_ —”

“You wouldn’t dare,” he interrupts serenely. “It’s too useful for putting the baby to sleep.”

This is true. Recently they’d found that Joanna, Gabriela’s newborn, named for their own mother, fell asleep to Jaskier’s playing like she’d been given a sleeping draught. She isn’t a _bad_ baby, per se, but it hasn’t been easy for Gabriela and her husband to balance child-rearing duties between Zofia and Joanna, as well as Gabriela’s work as a healer and her husband’s work in the fields, so a few times Jaskier has offered his babysitting duties and decided that he could play his lute for an audience so long as they were younger than four years old. (One day, he’ll bring his music out for his family and his friends, and he won’t feel mildly nauseous at the thought.)

Zofia had been enraptured, demanding that he teach her to play. Joanna had gone out as easily as snuffing a candle. Gabriela and her husband had been overjoyed to learn of this new development. Jaskier is slightly disgruntled that his playing is apparently only good to send babies to sleep, but there’s a certain joy he’s found in teaching some basic chords to Zofia, who can’t hold the lute very well in her tiny hands and also has the attention span of an average toddler—which is to say: not a very long one.

“Hmm. Maybe. But we still haven’t found out if it’s _your_ lute playing or just _any_ lute playing that sends her to sleep, since you won’t let anybody touch your lute—”

“—And I never will,” Jaskier interjects primly ( _except for very tiny children_ , he amends mentally).

“—So you might not actually be as useful as you think you are. Just saying.”

Jaskier digests this for a second, then counters, “but are you willing to risk it?”

Gabriela is silent, and Jaskier is ready to take this as a victory, when she admits, “not really.”

It’s the most mature ending to this conversation that Jaskier can conceive. He’s proud of both of them.

“Look at us,” he nudges her with a grin. “Being adults.”

She rolls her eyes and flicks a piece of bread at him. He retaliates with a slice of cheese. The moment is effectively ruined.

After a moment, he grows sober, because he _did_ actually have a reason for dragging her out into the sunshine, and it’s not a conversation he particularly wants to have but it’s one that they _need_ to have.

“I need to talk to you,” he begins awkwardly, not wanting to just dive right into it and also very conscious of how _exhausted_ his sister looks. He’d wanted to do it in the sunshine, he’d wanted it to be just them, and he’d wanted to get it over with quickly, like ripping off a bandage. Suddenly this doesn’t seem like such a brilliant idea.

Gabriela just nods; she probably had some idea of what was coming, considering how the past few weeks have been. “Okay,” she says simply, and Jaskier lets out a gusty sigh. Right, then.

“Father… is getting worse,” he hesitates after the first word, before forcing the rest of the sentence past an oddly-closed up throat. He hasn’t really said it out loud before. Strange that he should be finding it so difficult.

Gabriela smiles at him. It’s a sad smile. “Well, we didn’t think he would get _better_ , really,” she says gently, so gently that Jaskier closes his eyes against it, because none of this should be fucking happening to him. Them. She’s not so much older than him, she oughtn’t look so _wise_. He forces himself to breathe through his tight throat and wills his face to remain impassive.

Jaskier nods, eyes still closed. “Yeah, he—um. He’s still eating, at least, but he insists the food tastes like mud and that we’re poisoning him. He has these… episodes, sometimes, where he won’t remember any of us, like—like mother used to.” His throat closes entirely against the last word, choking it out, and Gabriela reaches over and rests a hand on his knee.

“As long as he’s eating and sleeping, it’ll be alright,” she reassures him. He wonders if he can tell her that just eating and sleeping doesn’t equate to _living_ , that the man they knew as their father is barely more than a shell of himself, that being _alright_ has multiple definitions and nearly none of them can be applied to Juliusz. He’s alright because he’s _not dead_. It’s an awful way to live.

Jaskier opens his eyes, and takes her hand in his, and smiles as genuinely as he can at her. “Yeah,” he agrees, “he’ll—he might be alright for a while, yet. I just wanted you to know.”

She raises a brow, but apparently decides not to challenge him. “Thank you. Was there anything else?”

It’s a beautiful day. Jaskier grins at her, mischief palpable on his face, and says, “tell me about Joanna.”

He loves his niece. Caring for her now isn’t as frightening as it had been to look after Zofia, after the Fae had first invaded when none of them had any experience with children, and had to find a woman from the village who was willing to look after her. Nel still spends time her, and has agreed to take Joanna for an hour or so each day as well, but two of the other surviving women in the village have had children in the last few months and so her services and experience have been in higher demand.

Gabriela talks about Joanna like there has never been a more perfect baby. Jaskier grins as he indulges her, listening to all the ways her daughter is better than any other daughter ever, and quickly smooths his expression into one of agreement whenever she looks over to him. He doesn’t quite manage it, judging by her scowls.

Then she hesitates, and says, “I think Zofia is having a hard time… adjusting.”

Jaskier frowns. “Really? I’ve not noticed anything.”

“Yes. She’s been the baby for so long—I think she’s jealous, because everyone’s been giving Joanna so much attention and Zofia’s not used to sharing. I don’t know what to do about it.”

It makes sense, he supposes, cursing himself for not having thought of it before, or even noticing.

“She’s not been doing anything _bad_ ,” Gabriela reassures him when he asks, “she’s just been a lot grumpier than usual, and I don’t think it’s the heat.”

To be fair, it _could_ be the heat. Jaskier has been like a grouchy old cat at times in the last few weeks, under the oppressive sun.

He hums, and scratches idly at the base of his neck. “I’ll talk to her,” he decides, and Gabriela’s shoulders slump as she lets out a sigh.

* * *

Speaking to Zofia was uncomfortable in ways he’s never felt uncomfortable before.

He felt like his _father_.

She’d looked at him with exactly the same thinly veiled disdain that Jaskier is sure he’s looked at Juliusz for all those years, and while Juliusz had been a bully and hadn’t cared for his children at all, was different in every way to how Jaskier has helped with raising Zofia, he can’t help but doubt whether he’s _actually_ helping her, or if he’s going to wake up one day in twenty years and discover that his youngest sister loathes him.

…If they’re even alive in twenty years, which is by no means guaranteed.

Simply telling Zofia to be nice to her niece had been about as effective as if Jaskier hadn’t opened his mouth at all, so once she agreed to speak to him again, he’s been forced to employ different tactics.

“And how would _you_ feel, if you had no brothers or sisters at all to play with?” he asks his youngest sister, who’s regarding him with the most serious expression he’s ever seen on a child.

She sucks on her lip, chews on it, and then says, “I’d probably feel bad.”

 _Progress._ “So, how do you think Joanna feels?”

There’s a pause. Zofia fiddles with the hem of her shirt, not meeting his eyes. Jaskier leans back in his chair, clasps his hands in his lap, and waits her out.

He doesn’t have long to wait; his sister isn’t known for her _patience_.

“I think she probably feels bad, too.” Her voice is small and quiet and Jaskier refrains from smiling.

“So, do you think you could be a bit nicer?”

She meets his gaze then, her eyes quick and sharp, and he’s worried for a moment that she might see through him—

But then she mumbles, “alright.”

Jaskier has successfully negotiated with a two year old.

* * *

The Faerie eyes him curiously.

Jaskier affects not to notice, and continues sorting the piles of flowers he’s picked, separating and ordering them by colour. When he begins to braid them, the Faerie cocks its head and furrows its brows. Jaskier suppresses a smile.

He’s already completed one crown, and is halfway through a second when the Faerie apparently reaches the bounds of its patience. Over the past hour it’s shuffled closer a few times, peering at Jaskier out of the corner of its eyes and flicking its tail carelessly, pretending to just be stretching or itching or searching for a better position to soak up maximum sunlight; now, it sits barely two feet away from Jaskier and the piles of flowers, the mushroom line of the Faerie Ring an innocuous barrier between them. Its tail flicks lazily across the ground, and not for the first time, Jaskier wonders what it would feel like under his hand. The Faerie’s eyes keep darting between appraising him curiously and slitting themselves against the glare of the sun.

It should be unnerving, how desensitised Jaskier has gotten to a Faerie just existing in his space. He doesn’t even notice it anymore. The ramifications are no longer even a consideration.

Eventually, the Faerie breaks, and speaks. “Why?”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jaskier can appreciate that the Faerie hasn’t asked _what_ he was doing, just _why_ he was doing it. It’s a creature of few words.

“I want to practise, before the midsummer celebration,” Jaskier explains, holding up the crown he’s working on so as to better inspect it. The Faerie’s eyes track the movement, expression inscrutable.

“Flower crown,” the Faerie observes.

Jaskier hums an agreement.

“Flower crowns are… common elements of midsummer?” Jaskier doesn’t miss the disbelieving note in the Faerie’s question. He turns to appraise it.

“You’re five _million_ years old and you’ve never celebrated midsummer?” He doesn’t mention how he hasn’t really celebrated it, either.

The Faerie sighs, briefly looks skyward in a remarkably human move, and then says, “Songbird, we’ve been over this, I’m—”

“—older than time, we know,” Jaskier interrupts, waving his hand and ignoring the Faerie’s narrow-eyed glare. “Try this on.”

He slides the flower crown into the Ring. The Faerie eyes it dubiously.

Jaskier concentrates on beginning a third, the tip of his tongue poking past his teeth and lips as he concentrates and studiously does _not_ look at the Faerie, regarding the flower crown as if it is about to bite him. The flowers in his grip tangle, and he curses briefly as he picks them apart, trying to keep the heads intact and not pull _all_ the petals out, for Melitele’s sake, why is this so hard—

“ _Have_ you celebrated the summer solstice before?” Jaskier breaks the silence, briefly setting the flowers down before he tears them further. He forces his tone to be curious and not interrogative, while also pointedly not looking at the Faerie as he speaks.

There’s a pause, and then it hums. “When I got the chance,” it says cryptically. Jaskier picks up the mangled flowers and continues silently picking at them, hoping the Faerie will tell him more, and tries not to be disappointed when it doesn’t. The flower stems untangle, and suddenly the sad tangle becomes half a flower crown and he briefly congratulates himself for his _genius_ before he picks up another flower and begins braiding it in.

The silence doesn’t bother him. Not like it used to, at the beginning. Jaskier thinks he’s gotten better at just _existing_ , just being in the moment and appreciating it, rather than trying to make something of it. His hands are slowly becoming stained with the colours of the flowers, of the grass, and the sun glares down at him from above, and the Faerie is a solid presence beside him.

Jaskier is onto his fifth flower crown, trying to weave a pattern into the colours of the flowers and considering just throwing the whole embarrassment down and trying again, when the Faerie suddenly decides to speak up. “I always preferred Beltane,” it offers, and Jaskier’s hands jerk and tear a flower decidedly in two at the interruption of the quiet. Carefully he puts his hands down, and tries not to startle the Faerie back into silence. Getting stories out of his friend is usually like pulling teeth; that it’s choosing to voluntarily share information about itself now is a little unusual, though certainly not unwelcome.

It continues. “Beltane was always the first big festival after the winter, and people were willing to pay more around the celebrations, so I would always spend a few weeks in actual cities around that time. Midsummer’s always been too fucking hot,” it adds with a grumble, startling a grin out of Jaskier.

The way it had said ‘the winter’… there was an emphasis there that made Jaskier think he was really talking about something else.

Usually when the Faerie said one thing when it really meant another, the thing it was avoiding saying was _important_ to it. Jaskier knows that the Faerie was at Pavetta of Cintra’s betrothal; he knows secrets about King Foltest that would make his siblings’ hair curl (and hadn’t that been a thoroughly traumatising afternoon); he knows curse words in every language on the Continent, and all of its dead languages, too. He knows the lute he plays was given to the Faerie by Filavandrel, Elf-King. He knows the sordid tales of kings and queens and lords and ladies from courts that are long gone, in cities that don’t exist anymore.

He knows the true reasons for a dozen and more bloody wars, scores of victories and defeats, knows _why_ cities fell and rulers died and how the Faerie had, in one way or another, contributed. He doesn’t understand all of it, or even most of it, because there’s something fundamental and _important_ about itself that the Faerie resolutely isn’t sharing, and Jaskier hasn’t pressed. He knows enough about what it’s _done_ that what it _is_ doesn’t really matter.

He just doesn’t know anything about the creature itself that he hasn’t inferred—except that it prefers Beltane to Midsummer. And it has a penchant for falling into political machinations.

Jaskier has written songs about all of the adventures the Faerie’s told him about—most of them he won’t ever sing, but it’s kept his mind busy and he thinks the Faerie is at least appreciative of some of the raunchier ones.

He sneaks a peak over at the Faerie out the corner of his eyes, and learns something else new about his friend.

The flowers are kind of balanced atop one of its horns while the other curves through the circle of flowers, and the dandelions and other wild flowers Jaskier had braided together look even more ordinary and erroneous, perched where they are, and the Faerie looks horribly disgruntled about the whole affair—and despite all of that, it still looks really, _really_ good in a flower crown.

* * *

The bonfire is… bigger than Jaskier had expected.

When the village women had told him that there would be a bonfire, he had expected them to drag out one of the wagons they never use anymore, pile it full of kindling, and light it on fire. Perhaps they would build it a little higher with pallets, or else raid some of the empty village houses for creaking, unused furniture.

What he stands before now is as tall as the manor itself.

“Jasia,” he starts, and then stops. In the light of midday, the fire isn’t _such_ a formidable thing, though the way it roars and spits out sparks every time another element of its construction is consumed by flames certainly makes him take a step back. He can’t imagine how it will look, fully alight, in the dying light of a setting sun. He casts about for something to say, and fails.

There doesn’t seem to be much _to_ say.

Jasia is tall, and had been the innkeep’s daughter, back when Lettenhove had had an inn. She’d been sixteen when the Fae attacked, and is eighteen now, with broad shoulders and limbs thick with muscle and a long braid of hair down her back, and half the village boys have their eye on her—not that she seems particularly interested. She’s the youngest of the group he’d assigned to arrange the midsummer celebrations, and when Jaskier had expected her to talk the other women into something preposterous he certainly hadn’t expected a bonfire the size of _his house_ to be lit on basically his front lawn.

She turns to him and grins, producing a flower crown from her satchel and balancing it haphazardly on his head. “Do you like it?” she asks, indicating the fire.

Jaskier looks at it again. It would be difficult _not_ to look at it. “It’s… big,” he manages.

Jasia laughs. Jaskier suspects she’s a bit drunk on the power of the blaze. “It is big,” she agrees, and Jaskier finds himself being a bit unnerved by the way her eyes reflect the flames.

They stand beside each other and watch the bonfire.

“…Can I ask _why i_ t’s so big?” he dares.

Jasia doesn’t take her eyes off the fire as she explains. “The bonfires are for warding off evil spirits,” she tells him, and Jaskier remembers learning this in some old dusty tome, thinking it fanciful and of _some_ interest but not too much consequence, and including it in the notes he’d given her and the other women.

He should probably have seen this coming.

“Anyway,” she continues, “we figured: the bigger the bonfire, the more evil spirits it would keep away.”

He eyes the towering blaze. The fuel itself seems to be a mix of timber scavenged from the skeletons of abandoned village houses; splintered pieces of wood he can only assume had once been furniture; fresh logs cut from the forests. The flames lick up the sides and climb higher, distorting the air about it with the intense heat that has to be rolling off the bonfire in huge waves.

 _That thing could hold off the fucking Wild Hunt itself,_ he thinks grimly to himself. A tree trunk laid haphazardly against the tower suddenly cracks open in one long split up the blackening bark, a burst of flames shooting upward as the wood creaks an awful, shrieking groan, the heat mercilessly squeezing any remaining moisture from the trunk. With a bellow, the whole log is consumed by flame, and great plumes of sparks billow into the air. The wood sags against the bonfire, a drunkard reaching for support, before it slowly folds inwards. Jaskier winces as he hears another crash, but miraculously the bonfire doesn’t spill across the ground and the flames don’t leap toward them.

The midafternoon sun seems inconsequential next to this force of nature that they’ve amassed.

“Isn’t it incredible?” Jasia breathes, lost in the flames.

“Uh, yeah,” Jaskier says smartly, and leaves her there.

* * *

Jaskier has apparently underestimated how intoxicating setting fires would be.

They’ve sacrificed one of the old grazing paddocks to the enormous fire, on the provision that after the celebration the villagers would work to salvage it into something useable. They _also_ seem to have lit maybe half a dozen smaller fires in a ring around the first one. He’d left for an _hour_ to go and eat and make sure the children didn’t go setting themselves on fire, and he returns to find the fire has spawned smaller fires.

What Jaskier wants to know is _why_.

Ana finds him, beaming, offering him a June cake sticky with honey and sugar. He looks at her, then at the bonfires, and she catches on.

“They’re for luck!” she exclaims. “Once the sun sets a bit and the fires have burnt down some more, we’re going to jump over them.”

Jaskier can’t think of anything clever to say to that that isn’t ‘ _what the fuck?’_ He takes a bite of his cake as he thinks, licking the honey off his fingers where it drizzles down.

“I thought they did that at Beltane?” he finally asks, his face settling into a frown as he tries to recall. Most of the research he’d done had settled briefly in his mind, long enough for him to write it into concise notes and for him to help somewhat with the planning, and then slowly over the past weeks that knowledge has been forgotten. He can’t bring himself to be too upset over it.

Ana shrugs. “Don’t think any gods out there actually care, anyway,” she says mulishly. “If we want to set fires and go jumping over them, throwing wishes behind us as we go, who’s to stop us?”

Two years ago, Jaskier would have been horrified. Throwing curses into the fires of some forgotten, heathen god, tempting death if only for thrill of feeling alive—he couldn’t fathom it. Now, though…

“Maybe I’ll come by later,” he murmurs. Ana looks pleased.

There’s food and music and dancing. The kitchens had been nigh impenetrable, what with the incredible heat from all the ovens working overtime to provide for the villagers, and Marek has begrudgingly opened the wine cellars to crack open the cases of honey wine they haven’t gotten around to drinking yet, and the musicians (Jaskier _not_ included) make a respectable performance on their instruments, and by the time the wine is flowing freely nobody particularly cares, anyway. There are three dozen people present (though it feels like three hundred, with all the noise that they’re making), and Jaskier forces himself to enjoy the festivities and to dance with his family and his friends.

By the time the sun sits lazily on the horizon, the sky a vision of orange and pink and blue and, to the east, the first stars beginning to blink into view, Jaskier is hot and flushed from the wine and the bonfires, and his heart aches with the fullness of it.

He can concede that, yes, a celebration was just what they needed.

He’s just watching some of the young men make their leaps over the flames, wondering if he’d be able to manage it, when all the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Something is _watching_ him.

Slowly, he turns his head, trying not to draw attention to himself. Not that anybody seems particularly interested in him right now, anyway—Hanna’s blacksmith’s draughter has just cleared the flames, and Jaskier is _sure_ he saw sparks catch at her trousers—

And then he spies a glint of gold: two eyes, that blink slowly at him, before turning away.

Jaskier has taken three whole steps to follow after those eyes before some gut feeling he decides to call _survival instincts_ has him halting abruptly, fear blooming in his stomach and shooting up his spine and freezing his blood in his veins.

Should he follow?

The logical answer is: absolutely not, under _no circumstances_ should he chase a Faerie into the woods. This is how people get _eaten_. This is precisely how nearly all of the village children were lured away, never to be seen again—and yes, there are more children now, bred from the villagers in the waning of the Faerie attacks; and yes, nobody has even seen evidence of a Faerie (except for Jaskier) in nearly five weeks now, but this still feels like a _monumentally_ stupid idea.

Jaskier repeats those last few words to himself as his feet inexorably take him off to where those eyes had disappeared.

* * *

The cool shade of the trees does little to assuage Jaskier’s fears and rather a lot to sober him up. The honeyed wine is still sweet on his lips and his limbs feel loose and slow, but the thick haze that had settled heavily on his mind seems to lift under the dimness of the leafy canopy, the sky darkening steadily above. The trunks seem almost to close in on him as he ventures further. He tries not to liken the sensation to that of the jaws of a trap, ready to snap closed.

The forest is alive with leaves rustling and branches snapping and a cacophony of animal calls. Jaskier doesn’t bother with listening too closely; his Faerie won’t be making a single sound.

He walks until he finds a clearing; distantly, when the breeze is in the right direction, he can still hear the celebrations: raucous laughter and singing and music. If he screams, they might hear. The day was hot, and the heat still lingers in the air, so when his skin prickles and the hairs on the back of his neck all stand on end, he knows not to attribute it to any phantom chills. He’s being watched. That same vein of self-preservation from earlier determinedly shrieks _danger!,_ and when he turns around his breath catches and the ground beneath him bucks and pitches awfully. He manages to keep his feet, freezing in place while he eyes the creature before him.

Silver hair glints in the moonlight. The solemn beauty of it softens the curving horns, the golden, cat-slitted eyes, the queerly alabaster skin. Blackened, curved talons and a twisting tail are on the peripheral of Jaskier’s considerations as he looks at his Faerie, and his Faerie looks back.

He swallows.

Without the guaranteed safety of the Faerie Ring, without that odd line of mushrooms and half a dozen feet separating the two of them, the music of Jaskier’s lute filling the silence between them… the Faerie suddenly looks a lot bigger; Jaskier feels a lot smaller. More fragile. Stood across from the creature, he realises the Faerie is only barely taller than him, and Jaskier’s own broadness from years of physical toil rather than living a life of luxury in his father’s study, certainly isn’t inconsequential. But there’s a quietness to the way the Faerie stands, poised on the balls of its feet—a snake, about to strike; a wildcat about to pounce—that says this creature is _inhumanly_ strong. If it were made of mortal flesh and blood then Jaskier has no doubt he could take it in a fight; as it stands, Jaskier is a mere mouse at its feet.

The Faerie cocks its head. He feels _devoured_ by its gaze.

His heart pounds, and he wonders if it’s fear, or if it’s… something else, that has heated his blood and caused his face to flush.

He watches the pink of its tongue, the startling glint of fangs, as it licks its lips. “Songbird,” it murmurs, the name a caress in its mouth, and Jaskier resolves not to be afraid.

 _This is a really stupid idea,_ he reminds himself, as he eyes the distance between them and resolves to fix that. He takes one step forward, then another, and another, the forest floor crunching under his feet and the music of the festivities and the chorus of distant wildlife suddenly quieting beneath the blood rushing in his ears. He closes the space between them until there is but a scant metre or so, and steadfastly holds the Faerie’s gaze.

He can’t think of anything to say. “Tell me your name,” he tries. His mouth is dry, and he wishes absently for another bottle of wine to wet his tongue. The Faerie’s eyes have darkened at his request.

“Names have power,” the Faerie murmurs. _It wouldn’t be safe,_ Jaskier hears.

Jaskier shakes his head in denial. “You wouldn’t hurt me,” he states, conviction weighing his words, and the Faerie smiles grimly.

“No,” it agrees, and a bolt of _something_ zings through Jaskier, alighting his nerves and quietly thrilling him. “It’s not _me_ you should be worried about,” the Faerie adds, more quietly, and Jaskier sucks in a sharp breath at the admission. He’s learning all kinds of new things about his Faerie, now, in these last few weeks, and he wonders what changed.

“Who, then?” he dares to ask, eyeing the Faerie and wondering how it would feel under Jaskier’s hands, how it would react if he were to just… reach out.

The Faerie makes a low, displeased rumbling sound, and Jaskier holds his breath for half a heartbeat before he figures out it isn’t _him_ the Faerie’s displeased with. He chances another step closer, and now—now they’re within arm’s length of one another.

“I can’t tell you without putting you at risk, Songbird,” the Faerie says finally. Jaskier doesn’t say anything at all. His heart is hammering so loudly that it’s a wonder he can’t hear the rolling drumbeat of it, thundering through the clearing. _Time to be brave._

Slowly, carefully, _gingerly,_ he extends his arm out, and flattens his palm against the Faerie’s chest. The rough weave of its cotton shirt is a shock against his fingers, and beneath the cloth he feels something hard and disk-shaped, though he can’t make out the carved details. He feels the slow thump of the Faerie’s heartbeat beneath his fingers, and wonders how it can be so calm. He feels the astonishing heat rolling off the creature and seeping into his hand, warming the air around it, and wonders how it would feel pressed up against his own chest. Wonders what the Faerie’s _skin_ must feel like, if it can be so warm through layers of clothing. He feels, he feels, he feels.

For several terrifying heartbeats, neither of them breathes.

Then the Faerie takes a breath, and so does Jaskier, and he keeps his gaze firmly on his hand, his fingers splayed wide against that cotton shirt. He doesn’t dare look up and meet the Faerie’s gaze that he _feels_ is fixed on him.

For several heartbeats more, Jaskier matches his breathing to the Fae’s, feeling the rise and fall of its chest beneath his hand. His whole arm tingles with the contact.

Seconds or minutes or _years_ later, the Faerie reaches up and delicately takes Jaskier’s wrist in one hand. It doesn’t pull him away, doesn’t grip him tightly, doesn’t yank him closer—just holds him, the Faerie’s calloused fingers scraping the soft skin of Jaskier’s wrist. The contact _burns_.

Jaskier breathes, and the Faerie breathes, and far away, music grows and swells and Jaskier thinks absentmindedly about dancing.

Dancing with a Faerie.

 _Well, fuck it,_ he thinks to himself, and grins at the thought.

He withdraws his hand from the Faerie’s chest, noting the way its face twitches when he breaks the contact, twisting his hand out of the light grip on his wrist. He takes the Faerie’s hand in his, Jaskier’s sword-callouses matching the Faerie’s exactly, and he files that information away to be examined _later._ Hardly daring to breathe, hardly daring to believe this is _real_ , that he’s not dreaming or lost in a daydream, he places his other hand on its shoulder and grips the fabric there, feels the solid muscle beneath his fingers. He’s not brave enough yet to step forward, flush against it, and close the gap between them; instead he maintains a more-than-appropriate distance between the two of them, and this way he can watch the Faerie’s face anyway (even if its gaze feels like it burns). After a brief hesitation, the Faerie places a hand on the curve of his waist, scorching and gentle and Jaskier twitches away from the contact, then presses into it.

And then they’re dancing.

At first, he allows the silence. Allows the creature to watch him, even though he keeps his gaze firmly away from the Faerie’s eyes. The talons that curl around Jaskier’s fingers and into his waist are razor-sharp, and they don’t even scratch him. The tail that flicks behind the Faerie curls placidly around one of its legs, brushing almost hesitantly against Jaskier’s shin, and he does _not_ jump at the contact, he _doesn’t,_ even though the Faerie lets out a low rumble of laughter.

At first, he allows the silence, and then he asks, “how long can you stay?” He’d thought the Faerie would only be free until the sun set, but… apparently not. Above them the sky is bruised and bleeds a thousand stars, and to the west the sun sinks lower and lower, and the Faerie is here still, in his arms. _In his arms._ He marvels at the thought.

It hums. He fancies he can feel the rumble of it even from here, though that’s probably just the way the Faerie squeezes his hand a little bit, and his grins. Jaskier knows it well enough by now to be able to label this one a _thinking_ hum. “There’s nothing physically stopping me from wandering where I please,” it says slowly, voice low and raspy and _fuck_ , a bolt of want shoots through Jaskier with such ferocity that his knees nearly buckle beneath him. He grips the Faerie’s shoulder and hand and forces himself to remain upright and thinks, _oh, I’m fucked._ It twirls Jaskier into a spin, easily navigating the steps, before bringing him back to its chest. “The creatures who put me in the Ring make sure I stay there by hunting me down any time I try to leave. Midsummer’s magic hides me, for now, but it’ll fade by tomorrow. I need to be back before they can scent me out again.”

 _Oh,_ fuck. That’s… a lot. Jaskier purposefully doesn’t react to the sudden deluge of new information; instead, he grimaces, and asks, “what will they do?”

The Faerie just looks at him, and doesn’t elaborate.

“Well,” Jaskier says after a moment, “that’s bullshit.” He concentrates on his feet briefly as he circles around the Faerie, before he looks up to meet that frighteningly intent gaze. The Faerie hums in agreement.

 _What_ creatures _put him there? What could possibly be more powerful than the fucking Fae? Why have none of its brothers or sisters bothered trying to help?_

Possibly they haven’t helped because this Faerie is… different. If it were any other Faerie, Jaskier would have been eaten _months_ ago. Instead they’re dancing together.

“What creatures?” he asks, before he can think better of it, and the Faerie _hums_ again, and stays quiet for a good long while.

They dance, and Jaskier has nearly given up hope before eventually it says, “it’s too dangerous for me to tell you.”

He could say, _I don’t care_. He could say, _I want to help._ He could say, _it’s not safe for me anyway._ He could say, _I think I’m falling in love with you, and I think I have been for a while._

He doesn’t say any of those things, because he’s _afraid,_ and he’s been brave enough for one night already, so instead what he says is, “alright, then.”

It’s getting easier to look into that golden gaze, and Jaskier does so now. He no longer trembles under the strength of it. He can see the way the corner of its eyes are tight, the amused glint that has Jaskier smiling back. The heat that the Faerie’s body gives off is intoxicating; he thinks wildly back to a day nearly three weeks before when Jaskier had startled a laugh out of the Fae, and its face had lit up like a sky full of fireworks, like the behemoth of a bonfire his village had built, like the sky during a sunrise, getting brighter and more beautiful. Even the fangs couldn’t distract from the beauty of it.

This is his _friend_ ; Jaskier doesn’t need to be afraid.

He grins at it, and waggles his eyebrows, and tightens his grip on its shoulders as it pulls him into a faster dance. The Faerie, for its part, softens its gaze and grips Jaskier tighter in return.

Half of him is still convinced that this is just a dream, and he’ll wake up and none of this will have happened.

A very, very tiny part of him (he has a sneaking suspicion it’s the part he called his _survival instincts_ , and he shouldn’t be getting so good at ignoring them) is _convinced_ that any second now, his friend is going to be possessed by some insurmountable craving for human flesh, and Jaskier will finally become a Faerie’s lunch. He doesn’t _believe_ this tiny part of him, of course, but it’s disconcerting all the same.

The Faerie slides its hand around Jaskier’s waist, pulling him closer, and murmurs, “you once said you wanted somebody to take you away.” Jaskier shivers as its breath ghosts over the shell of his ear, and nods.

“Anywhere but here.”

“I’ll do it.”

It takes a moment for the words to compute, for him to understand what the Faerie is saying, and when he does, he freezes and stumbles his feet and they careen to a halt. They’d _just_ been talking about how the Faerie is trapped, how there are monsters out there that a bigger and badder than it and it’s _afraid_ of them, how Jaskier can’t help or he’ll be in danger, too. He tilts his head up to catch the Faerie’s gaze and realises that maybe the Faerie has realised that, and wants… something else. A nice lie, perhaps. A fantasy where, one day, the two of them will escape and go away and they’ll never have to think about Faerie Rings or monsters or cages ever again.

 _No, you won’t_ , Jaskier thinks, and then says, “I know.”

Far away, the music stops, and regretfully Jaskier pulls away from the Faerie ( _run!_ a tiny voice in his mind howls) to eye the edge of the clearing. His feet are sore and his limbs feel heavy with exhaustion, and he’s still a little drunk from the honeyed wine and the high of dancing with his Faerie, so when he spies a trunk that’s ancient and weathered and wide enough for the two of them to sit against it side by side, he finds and tugs on the Faerie’s hand without thinking too hard about any of it. It doesn’t seem to understand, but it goes with him willingly enough when he draws them both over to it.

The Faerie is a furnace against his side and the tree is horrible against the back of his head, so he shifts until he can pillow it on the Faerie’s shoulder instead.

The night is still and silent. The Faerie’s tail curls around Jaskier’s ankle, and out of some morbid curiosity he reaches down to slide a finger across it; it feels almost leathery, and cooler than he’d imagined, and it tightens around his ankle until he brings his finger away.

Finally, he scrounges up the courage to ask something he’s been thinking about for… a while: “when does this end?”

He feels the Faerie set its head atop his own; hears its horns scratch the bark above them; shivers under the heat that envelops him.

“It doesn’t,” the Faerie murmurs quietly, and Jaskier thinks he already knew that.


	9. Chapter 9

Jaskier’s absence on the evening of midsummer is not noted.

This is largely due to the copious amounts of wine consumed during the holiday, and the almost-torturous hangovers that everybody is nursing the next day.

Thankfully, nobody is sporting any burns—no serious ones, anyway—and the bonfire burnt itself down to ashes in the early hours of the morning without spewing flames everywhere, so Jaskier is inclined to determine the celebration a success.

He remembers dancing with his Faerie almost as though it had been a dream. He remembers the blazing heat of the Faerie’s body against his own; remembers the rough scrape of its hand in his; remembers the rumbling cadence of its voice as it promises him freedom, no matter how impossible that seemed.

The morning after midsummer dawns bright and clear, to the consternation of all those that are hungover, and Jaskier (who hadn’t actually consumed that much wine and had also gulped down enough skins of water that he suffers nothing more than a persistent headache and some dizziness) (well, maybe it had actually been a lot of wine, but _still_ ) is directing the youngest and least-affected of the revellers in clean-up efforts.

There’s shattered glass _all over_ the grass, somehow, and judging by the guilty looks people keep shooting one another, they all know _exactly_ who is to blame. He lets them sort out among themselves which of them get the worst jobs. He’s just waved them off to go sit down in the shade and take a break when Ana comes to him in a panic and tells him that Juliusz is in the East garden.

He stares.

“Juliusz?” he repeats, just to clarify.

She nods, looking miserable. “One of the kitchen girls had an early night last night; she was up early this morning making a start on clean up, spied him out the window, and ran to tell me straightaway.”

Now that he looks, Ana doesn’t particularly look as though she’s escaped the consequences of last night’s revelry herself—her eyes are bloodshot and underlined by dark bags, and as he watches she blinks, slowly and tiredly.

Not the time; he blinks, baffled, trying to process what she’d told him. “And she’s _sure_ it was Juliusz? My father? The one currently _locked in his rooms_ , supposedly?” _Was she drunk?_ He doesn’t add, but his expression must be sufficiently doubtful to convey his misgivings regardless, because Ana hastens to explain.

“She’s a good girl, sir, and she washes all his linens, so she knows what he looks like. She says he was just… humming, sir.”

Jaskier stares at her a moment longer. _Humming?_ Jaskier has been singing for as long as he can remember, and for as long as he can remember, his father has despised all forms of music. There’s no way he’d be caught dead _humming._ He ponders this for a moment more, realises that, at this point, it isn’t really the most important part of what Ana just told him, and deliberately shakes off the confusion.

“Who brought him his food this morning?” he asks after a moment’s deliberation.

“Just—just one of the lads, sir. Usually we don’t see him when we bring him his food anyway, sir, and nobody much likes going further into his rooms to check. I mean, there’s _no way_ he’d get out any other way than the door, and everybody checks that religiously, and—”

“—Ana, _Ana,_ it’s okay, I promise—I was just wondering if we could establish _when_ exactly he’d got out, it’s not too important. I’ll just go fetch him now and bring him back to his rooms, okay?” She doesn’t look as soothed as he’d hoped, but she at least doesn’t look on the verge of tears anymore, so Jaskier considers it enough.

Maybe he ought to bring reinforcements. “How many of us aren’t too hungover to deal with him?”

“Um, I think it was only the younger of us who were really drinking so… you’d be better off asking Ulryk, to be honest.” Jaskier _does not_ want to ask Ulryk, because Ulryk had never been on board with the excess drinking in the first place and he’d just be unbearably smug about the whole affair, and besides, it’s not like Jaskier really _needs_ backup to deal with his father. He hasn’t the last few times, at least.

The East garden isn’t far, and Jaskier refrains from running (he isn’t hungover, he _isn’t,_ he’s just… distinctly more wobbly than normal) so as not to worry anybody who sees him—the sight of somebody running is usually cause for concern. Instead he walks deliberately and gracefully to the East garden, just barely containing a wince when he steps out from the shadow of the building into the full glare of the sun.

And… there’s Juliusz.

He looks vulnerable. There’s a brief half moment where Jaskier wrestles with what to call the man, before deciding that his given name has sufficed well enough for years, now, and will do so in this instance as well. (Jaskier doesn’t think he’ll call this man _father_ ever again.)

“Juliusz?” he calls, voice low and nearly gentle, and mentally pats himself on the back when it doesn’t waver. The sight of his father so dishevelled, so reduced, has him feeling all sorts of emotions right now that he isn’t too sure how to quantify, and they sit like a rock in his chest, over his heart.

Juliusz twitches his head, just a little, so he can watch Jaskier out the corner of his eye. Jaskier watches him right back.

“Juliusz,” he repeats. “You shouldn’t be out here, come on.” Juliusz doesn’t reply, just turns his gaze forward again, staring unblinkingly at the sun. If he concentrates, Jaskier can hear him humming.

The silence draws and stands for several minutes, Jaskier waiting for Juliusz to acknowledge him while Juliusz contentedly ignores him, before Jaskier finally admits defeat. He slumps out of the parade rest he’d habitually taken up while waiting for his father and stalks over to take Juliusz by the arm. The man startles _badly._ Upon looking up and meeting Jaskier’s eyes, Juliusz’ face drains of all colour, and he _screams._

Jaskier jumps forward to slap a hand over Juliusz’ mouth, quieting him, and a very tiny vindictive voice inside his head whispers to just snap Juliusz’ neck here and now, which horrifies him so thoroughly that Jaskier immediately releases him, jerking away. Juliusz scrambles backwards as well, landing himself in a heap on the ground and still staring wide-eyed at Jaskier, terror writ distinctly across his features.

Juliusz’ mouth is clamped closed still, a strangled scream tearing from his throat, muffled and croaking and _awful._ It rings in Jaskier’s head until it near deafens him. He kind of wants to scream, too.

“Juliusz—Juliusz,” he tries, thrusting his hands forward, palms out flat and signalling _surrender_ , hoping Juliusz will calm and stop making that horrible croaking groan. It doesn’t work.

“Fuck,” he breathes to himself. He doesn’t know what to do. What the _fuck_ is he supposed to do?

He considers calling for help. But then, if there had been anybody around _to_ help, he wouldn’t be doing this alone in the fucking first place, so he supposes there isn’t any point.

He considers leaving Juliusz here and going to fetch his brother, or Ana, or an elder, or _somebody_ , but Juliusz looks ready to bolt and Jaskier doesn’t think he’d stay more than half a minute once Jaskier left him, so… not that, either.

At a loss for anything else to do, Jaskier edges forward to take Juliusz’ arm, gingerly gripping him until it’s clear that he has no intentions of attacking. Feeling more bold, Jaskier takes a firmer grip and tugs, pulling Juliusz to his feet. He follows easily, still making that awful, grating wail, muted behind his terror-locked jaw.

The hairs on the back of Jaskier’s neck stand on end and he snaps his head up on instinct, scanning the treeline, before he even realises what he’s scanning _for._

There’s something out there.

There’s _definitely_ something out there.

There’s no movement, but Jaskier knows firsthand how quickly the Fae can move, how they don’t _need_ to in order to lure you in. How they can sing and call and draw a dozen children right out of their beds, into their open, waiting jaws.

Jaskier isn’t about to sit around and get _eaten._

He takes a step towards the manor, then another, and another, and when nothing bursts from the treeline to eat them alive he turns and stalks as quickly as he can without running, tugging Juliusz behind him. The man has fallen quiet, and Jaskier doesn’t even stop to check behind him and see if he’s okay—they’re hurrying down the halls of the manor to Juliusz’ wing, and Jaskier is hoping against hope that they aren’t spotted.

This would be fairly awkward to explain.

They reach Juliusz’ door, and Jaskier encounters a new problem.

It’s _still fucking locked._

“Shit,” he mutters under his breath. Behind him Juliusz is silent and still.

* * *

“Huh,” is Ana’s very helpful input. And then, “you’re _sure_ it was locked?”

Jaskier fixes her with a look. “I had to use a _lockpick_ to get in there.” Ana’s face twists and he just knows she’s going to ask him why he had a lockpick and not the key, so he cuts her off before she can even get any words out with a, “don’t ask.”

She swallows this, and thankfully lets it go. Instead, she asks, “so how _did_ he get out?”

Jaskier can only shrug. They stand quietly together for a moment before Ana heaves out a sigh, heavy and dramatic and exaggerated enough that for a moment their situation isn’t so dire.

“I hate this.”

Jaskier closes his eyes and says, “yeah. Me too.”

* * *

Two days later, Jaskier hears that Juliusz had been found outside of his rooms the evening before by the servant sent to bring him his dinner. She’d had to unlock the door to put him back inside, and when she’d checked him for a key or some other means of unlocking and then relocking the door, she’d found nothing.

* * *

The third time happens the day after that, and it’s Marek running to find him, eyes wide in distress, and Jaskier drops the sack of nails he’d painstakingly been picking from the patch of ground where the bonfire had been, to give his brother his full attention.

“Breathe,” he says, before Marek even opens his mouth. “C’mon, take a breath. Then talk.”

Marek pauses, pants harshly for several heartbeats, then says, “Father has escaped.”

“Okay,” Jaskier says, with too little alarm if the troubled wrinkle between Marek’s brows is any indication. “Okay. Where is he?”

“He’s—out by the East garden. Just past it—towards the forest.” He pauses to pant several times as he relays his information, and Jaskier freezes.

 _East garden. Why does this keep happening?_ He shakes the paranoia off and grips Marek’s shoulders. “Okay—right, calm down, it’s okay, calm down. I’m sure he’s fine, we’ll just go and fetch him now, yeah?”

Marek nods, and some of the tension seems to leech from his shoulders.

The walk over there is quiet and charged and Jaskier can tell that Marek has about a million questions knocking about in his head, and he’s almost glad when they reach the garden, because the tension was about to send him crawling up the walls.

As it is, when they arrive, Marek curses a very heartfelt, “ _fuck,”_ and Jaskier finds himself nodding.

Juliusz had turned to look at them both upon their arrival, his face cold and unreadable and almost _alien_ in how utterly forbidding it is, and as they watch he turns and pads towards the forest. There’s something off-putting about his gait—his head is lowered, his shoulders hunched up around it like he’s fighting off a chill, or else horribly uncomfortable in his own skin. His legs move jerkily, like he hasn’t walked in a while and is remembering how to use them, and his arms are rigid and unmoving by his sides.

In a brief, startlingly abrupt moment of clarity, Jaskier thinks to himself, _he’s going to fucking die._

Then he’s running forward, ignoring Marek’s startled yelp from behind, and he’s almost sure he saw a flicker of movement from the treeline—but then he’s got a hand on Juliusz’ arm and he’s pulling him back, back. To safety.

* * *

They still don’t know how he’d gotten out.

* * *

_Everybody_ knows how he’s getting out—or at least, they know what’s responsible for his getting out—and they know as well that there isn’t a damned thing they can do that they aren’t already doing. Jaskier hasn’t gone to see his Faerie in a week, for stress of checking and rechecking the wards on all of the boundaries, checking that the adder stones and the runes haven’t been tampered with.

He theorises that Juliusz’ mental state makes him an easy target, like the young children had been. However the Faeries crawl inside somebody’s head, they’re having an easier time of it with Juliusz.

Jaskier is terrified for Zofia, and Joanna, and the half dozen other small children they’re managing.

* * *

The last time is the worst time, and Jaskier can’t speak a word of what he sees to _anybody._

In retrospect, he thinks that he probably should have died. It’s a difficult thing, facing your own mortality, and he’s had to come to terms with that in the last few years since monsters invaded his home and thoroughly ruined his life. Logically, he _knows_ he should have died, and he can’t help thinking that these fuckers are _toying_ with him.

(He refuses to think about the Faerie he’s friends with, locked up in a Faerie Ring, because he’s confused and he’s frightened and his father is _dead,_ damnit, and none of this is right and none of it should have happened and now he’s grieving a man who’d never loved him, and who he had never loved, and he should be feeling upset but he _isn’t_ and _what does that say about him?)_

It’s evening, the sun almost completely set on the horizon, the sky a bruised purple and a brilliant indigo and a swallowing black, and Jaskier has just finished his last checks on the horses, when he hears… a noise.

How he hasn’t died yet, Jaskier doesn’t know, because his first instinct is immediately to go and inspect it. He knows _full well_ that none of his animals made that noise; there’s nobody else about but him. There’s only one thing that could make the kind of noise that stands all of his hairs on end and turns his blood to ice.

He briefly considers searching the tack room for some kind of a weapon before deciding that, if there’s a Faerie out there intent on eating him, there’s actually very little that he can do to dissuade it from doing so. Instead he squares his shoulders and slinks outside, keeping his footsteps as silent as he can manage and keeping his ears pricked for any other tiny noises.

There’s a groan. It’s soft, and far away, but it’s _definitely_ a groan. On a whim, he begins to pick his way through the darkness toward the East gardens, where the night is brilliantly dark. He’s certain that whatever he finds there will be horrifying.

He resists the urge to call out. Each step he takes chills him more, beyond the coolness of the night air—no, what’s chilling him is a frigid spike of dread, burrowing into his spine. The fear is so palpable he can taste it on his tongue, acrid and burning, and he bites down on his lip to let his mouth fill with the taste of metal instead. His hands shake and his eyes begin to pick shapes out in the darkness that aren’t there, and he really just wants to turn around and run but this is something he inexplicably feels as though he _needs_ to see.

The East garden is dark, and deserted.

The treeline across from it isn’t.

Jaskier stands amongst the lovingly tended growth, vegetables and flowers and a fruit tree tree that is black and terrible in the night, and he struggles not to scream.

There’s a Faerie out there.

Its skin is bone white, with lanky black hair. Its eyes are squeezed shut.

Jaskier once watched a python eat a rabbit, when he was at Oxenfurt. He’d flinched, at the initial strike, and then stared in morbid fascination as the creature unhinged its jaw and began to slowly run its teeth, bite by bite, across the rabbit’s fur: blood pricked and welled each time the snake sunk its fangs in again, and again, pulling the poor creature into its mouth in increments. The snake’s neck had swollen, the skin around the scales stretching further than he’d thought possible, and the rabbit had been visible as a lump all the way down the snake’s throat to the thickest part of its body.

The snake’s dead eyes hadn’t bothered him: it had been those first moments, when the snake had choked down its dinner, jaw impossibly wide about its prey, that had stuck with him.

He’s reminded of that now, as he watches that bone-white Faerie consume his father.

Jaskier should feel horror.

He should feel terror.

He should feel any number of things; instead, he feels nothing—he feels _empty._ Like everything that was him has been drained out, and now all he can do is stand, unfeeling, and watch the Faerie swell, its skin stretching and thinning and its lips tearing, rivulets of blood dripping, and its fangs sink into his father’s neck, his shoulders, his back, as the Faerie grows impossibly and sinks further down.

“Juliusz,” Jaskier whispers. At least, he _thinks_ he did; he’d moved his lips and pushed air out, and all he can hear is a faint whistling, and all he can see is his father standing still, placid, as the Faerie twitches and then suddenly the rest of his father’s torso is gone.

The Faerie’s skin is marbling, black veins showing in the night, and Jaskier can see the press of Juliusz’ shoulders, his hands, his clothes—

The Faerie’s arms, previously stunted and immobile by its side as its neck and chest and _body_ bloats and grows and creaks, suddenly jerk forward to grasp Juliusz low down on his hips. There’s a moment during which Jaskier can’t even _breathe,_ and then the Faerie jerks, slithering backwards, dragging Juliusz with it—

Jaskier sees his father’s legs kick once, twice, and then the monster and its meal are gone, disappeared into the trees.

There’s a _crunch,_ followed by a shrieking screech.

Jaskier turns and bolts.

* * *

The next morning, he goes to his father’s rooms.

They’re empty.

He finds Marek, takes him to the East gardens. Takes him up to the treeline.

Juliusz’ footsteps are easy to find, as are the drag marks.

Jaskier is empty, empty, empty.

He still hasn’t reconciled the horror of what he saw to what he knows to be possible.

Part of him wants to believe that it had all just been a nightmare.

Part of him wants to believe that the last two years have all just been a nightmare.

Part of him wants to believe that he’s really just losing his mind, like his mother and his father before him, and he’s hallucinating the most awful scenes you can imagine, and he clings to that hope with a desperate intensity until he hears that one of the men, daring to venture into the very outskirts of Fae territory, has found a fresh pile of bones, and Juliusz’ signet ring, spat back up like the Faerie _meant_ to mock him.

Perhaps it had. Perhaps it still is. Jaskier floats from one day to the next, burying his father’s bones next to his mother’s, burying the signet ring under a pile of papers in his office. Ordering his father’s wing to be emptied and scrubbed and left to fallow. Left to _rot._

He can’t talk to people. He can barely look at his brother.

Hanna and Gabriela are shaken, but they have their loves, and Gabriela has Joanna, and Hanna takes over looking after Zofia, and Marek takes the village, and Jaskier feels like he’s drowning because he can’t get the imagine of the Faerie stretching and distorting and _consuming_ out of his head.

He tries drawing it, once; he burns the paper, and then sits and doesn’t move for the rest of the day.

Time passes slowly and devastatingly quickly, and yet, when he finds himself clawing back up for air, he learns that only days have passed. Two weeks since midsummer.

He desperately misses his Faerie, and never wants to see him again.

* * *

He finally crawls back to the Faerie Ring.

It’s been three weeks since midsummer, and he’s both hoping and dreading that the Faerie had been worried about him, because he isn’t sure how he can _explain_ all of this.

What does he say? _My father lost his mind some time ago, and in the last month or so he’s been slowly seduced into somehow surviving a two storey drop to the ground to go and feed himself to a Faerie._ It just doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

Sweat beads at his nape and drips down his back, soaking his shirt, and beneath him his horse is lazy and slow, and he hasn’t figured out what he’s going to say and he has to do so _very quickly,_ because he’s trailing up the path toward the Faerie Ring now.

He holds his breath as he guides the horse into the clearing, and can’t decide whether he’s disappointed or not, when he finds the Ring empty.

Well—he’s already here, and it’s a disgustingly hot day, and his horse is dozing already, so Jaskier untacks the poor thing and hitches it to a tree before pulling out his own songbook. He already knows he isn’t going to write anything—his head is still filled with images of his father being _eaten_ , and he hasn’t told anybody about what he saw and the terror and the snide little feeling that _he could have tried to help_ won’t leave him alone, and suffice it to say that he isn’t really in a writing mood.

He can doodle, though. He tries to draw a little flower that’s growing by his knee, and when it turns out approximately how he’d meant it to he tries a bird, and then the gelding, and he’s trying to figure out how horse legs work when something comes crashing through the undergrowth on the opposite side of the clearing.

He’s on his feet in an instant, hand going to his belt where he hasn’t strapped on a sword in weeks, ink splattering everywhere as everything in his lap tumbles unceremoniously to the ground. The horse jerks out of its stupor, flicking its ears to the source of the noise, before it apparently judges it not to be a threat.

Jaskier is… confused.

It’s a wolf—the same animal as before, he’s sure, except this time its side has been sliced open and blood is pouring out in a crimson river. It staggers, falls to the ground, then hauls itself to its feet again and takes the final few steps across the line of mushrooms into the Ring, where it slumps down again, side heaving erratically, before stilling.

 _Is it dead?_ It looks dead. Then it heaves in a deep, rattling breath, so it isn’t dead but soon it will be, if it keeps losing blood at such a rate. Jaskier draws himself up, warily makes his way to the Faerie Ring, and then hesitates, looking down at the line of mushrooms.

 _Months._ It’s been months and months. And he’s never once crossed it.

He’d never even touched his Faerie until three weeks ago, never even considered it a possibility until he’d started researching for midsummer.

He feels like he’s known his Faerie for years—and yet, he feels like he doesn’t know his Faerie at all.

He stares down at the wolf, panting more blood into the grass, and _thinks._ It’s the same one as before—the one that had saved him. And then it had led Jaskier through the forest to _this Faerie Ring,_ despite not knowing who Jaskier was or where he was going, and then it had left him there. Like it had known he was safe.

Some connections are forming in his mind, and he decides, for now, to go with the theory that this wolf and his Faerie know one another, in some form or other. Also, this wolf had saved his _life_ , once, so he can go ahead and try to help it, in return.

He steps into the Faerie Ring.

…distressingly, nothing happens.

He’d expected there to be _something,_ at least. A bang, or a flash, or the world spinning away beneath his feet as he’s instantly transported to the land of the Fae, or something. He hadn’t counted on there being _nothing_.

He’s… honestly a little disappointed.

He looks down to appraise the wolf again, and something inside him that had snapped when he’d watched his father slide down the gullet of a Fae seems to have kicked back into action again, because there’s a low, roiling horror building in his gut, and he thinks faintly that he might actually be sick.

The wolf’s breaths are getting shallower, though, and the blood is pouring out of it with far less speed than it had been before, so he goes and kneels by its side and puts his hands on its shaggy coat and prods around the wound. It’s deep, and it can only be by the grace of the gods that the animal managed to get back here at all. The wound turns out to not be one cut, but four—four long, deep gouges, parallel to one another, and Jaskier tries not to think about how they got there. There’s only one thing he can think of that would even try, let alone manage it.

In his saddle bags he has a small medical kit, and he fetches it now. It’s mostly to fix things quickly so he can get himself home to proper medical attention without bleeding to death, but he has ointments to prevent infection and there’s still a needle and thread in there from when Gabriela had taught him how to stitch somebody up, and he can pull the shirt off his back to mop the blood while he works.

The wolf lays still and quiet. It flicks its ears towards him often, and he can see its eye rolling back to try and look at him, but otherwise it lets him do as he will. There’s… trust, as strange as that thought might be.

Jaskier wonders vaguely where the Faerie is, if it can see this, if it’s refusing to help on principle or if there’s a reason it isn’t coming back. There’s _so much_ he still doesn’t know about his friend, and he resolves to think on all the gaps in his knowledge at a time where there isn’t blood pouring into his lap.

He has to press down hard to staunch the flow, and as the blood stops coming out quite so vociferously, he can only hope that it’s because he’s doing something right and not because the wolf is running out of blood to lose.

Gabriela had taught him how to stitch skin together, and since then he’s used it a few times on his horses when there was nobody more suited to doing so on hand, so he threads the needle with only slightly-shaking hands and when he makes the first stitch in the creature’s flesh, pulling the skin together, he only feels a _little_ bit sick.

The cuts are huge. Jaskier feels like he’s kneeling there for _hours_ , stitching the bloody wounds closed. He keeps his shirt pressed down, keeping pressure on the other side of the gaping, bloody holes in the wolf’s side, staunching the blood flow and praying that he’s not making anything worse.

The needle keeps slipping from his blood-slicked fingers, and when he runs out of thread and has to cut more off and tie it through he almost gives up on the endeavour entirely, but he grits his teeth and perseveres and eventually, _eventually,_ the sluggish bleeding ceases and the wounds sit tightly closed, and Jaskier can put the needle down and put his face in his bloody hands and cry.

The white wolf is covered in rusty, drying blood, its fur matting and _congealing_ , and Jaskier pets his hand down the gore and silently swears to himself that he’s _never_ doing this again, _ever._ He’s exhausted and famished and covered in blood, and he can’t even _begin_ to think about getting up and making his way home.

The wolf yawns. Jaskier stares, fascinated, at its gaping maw: the rows of fangs, the canines as long as one of his fingers, the pink tongue that lolls out to lick up a pink streak of blood that somehow landed by its mouth. He can’t help it; he yawns too.

Maybe he could just sleep here tonight. The wolf obviously isn’t going to hurt him—it would have done so a hundred times over already, if it had been so inclined, life-threatening wounds be damned—and Jaskier’s half convinced he ought to stick around to make sure it doesn’t die in the night, or something.

The wolf keeps its gaze trained on him until its eyes slide shut, its breathing deepens, and it breathes a gusty sigh out through its nose as it finally drifts into sleep. Jaskier reaches out, scratches his bloody fingers behind the animal’s ear, and then stretches out to lie on the ground beside it.

He hadn’t realised before how fucking _huge_ the wolf is. Laying down, it’s as long as he is—and Jaskier is by no means small.

The blood that had saturated the ground is soaking into his undershirt, and Jaskier is debating getting up and finding somewhere less absolutely disgusting to lay down when sleep takes him by surprise.


	10. Chapter 10

Jaskier wakes to sweltering heat suffocating him on all sides, and the unyielding feel of hard-packed ground beneath him. He’s pretty sure he manged to sleep on a rock.

He takes a moment to feel annoyed about this, before reality comes unceremoniously crashing back to him and he’s forced to wonder _how_ he can have slept on a rock, on hard ground, when he ought to be in his _bed._

He tries to sit up, is implacably prevented from doing so by a heavy weight laid across his chest and his legs, and blinks his sleep-crusted eyes into the morning sun to find a Faerie slumped over him, sleeping.

Of all the situations Jaskier has gotten himself into, this one wins for sheer insanity.

“Huh,” he manages. Saying words out loud and hearing them in the already-too-hot morning air manages to realise the situation for him, and he spends the next few minutes carefully flexing his arms and legs, trying to figure out how much room there is to manoeuvre: approximately none.

“Hey,” he says, his voice raspy from sleep. The Faerie doesn’t even twitch. “Some brilliant fucking hunter you are,” he grumbles loudly, trying in vain to work one of his hands free so he can poke the Faerie awake with it. It’s wrapped around him like an octopus, pinning his arms to his sides. He isn’t going anywhere.

“ _Hey,_ ” he tries again, his voice deliberately louder, and he winces as it resonates through the clearing, disturbing the otherwise-tranquil morning. Needlessly, he might add, because the Faerie only grunts something unintelligible and clings to him tighter.

This close, and in the light of day, Jaskier can really inspect his Faerie without fear of being caught. Its skin is smooth and Jaskier _had_ thought free from imperfections, but in such proximity, he counts numerous tiny scars, pale—nearly invisible, actually—and littered across its neck and what Jaskier can see of its shoulder, where its shirt has fallen. The silver strands of its hair are actually a remarkably human white-grey—the strands aren’t alien, like the bone-white of its skin, but rather more like that of an albino colouring, and this little human trait is impossibly endearing.

The creature’s horns curve wickedly, golden and forbidding, and they’re a little difficult to look at straight on. If he tilts his head and cranes his neck to the point of discomfort, Jaskier can look at them without any other part of the Faerie in sight, and he does so now, inspecting them with as clinical a detachment as he can muster. The sight of them invokes the same acrid revulsion as watching his father be eaten had, and the same sense of morbid fascination he’d felt has him closing his eyes against the picture, turning his head away and resting it instead against the Faerie’s shoulder.

Oh, if only his family could see him now.

Thankfully, the Faerie stirs minutely maybe ten minutes later, and Jaskier pulls his head back and barks a sharp, _“hey!”,_ which rouses the Faerie to lift its head and blink blearily at him.

Then they’re just… staring at each other.

“…good morning,” Jaskier says, after a lengthy pause.

“Hmm,” the Faerie hums.

“Uh.” Jaskier wriggles a little bit in the Faerie’s grip. “Think you could… maybe let go?”

A very tiny, blink-and-you-miss-it smirk flashes across the Faerie’s face. Jaskier thinks that if he’d been any further away, he wouldn’t have noticed it; this close, it’s hard _not_ to notice the hundreds of micro expressions the Faerie is apparently capable of.

“I’m not the one who fell asleep next to me,” it says loftily, and Jaskier blinks.

“I didn’t fall asleep next to you, though. It was—the _fucking wolf,”_ he gasps, tearing himself from the Faerie’s arms through sheer determination (and also the Faerie probably let him go), stumbling to his feet and backwards, putting space between them. The Faerie stays where he is on the ground.

“Wolf,” Jaskier says helplessly, after a moment. “There—you— _wolf.”_ Words aren’t coming to him. He doesn’t understand.

“It’s a spell,” the Faerie offers after a moment. Jaskier shakes his head mutely, still not understanding. “A spell to change me into a wolf. Kind of.” Then he shrugs, as if that information is apparently enough.

No, nope, Jaskier does not want to deal with this _today._ He turns, spots his horse lying flat on its side, snoring heavily, then whirls on the Faerie again and repeats, _“kind of?”_ His voice comes out as kind of a pathetic squeak.

“Yes. Like _this_ skin. It’s not really me, but it fits.”

…wait—

“What do you _mean,_ this skin _isn’t really you?”_ This is not how Jaskier had expected this morning to go. His father has fallen so far down on his list of problems that he’s barely even a consideration. He paces out of the Faerie Ring, then back into it again, a tiny part of him relishing that he can do that without being murdered. It’s the same instinct that had him sneaking into his father’s study as a child, or breaking into the restricted areas at Lettenhove. It feels _wrong,_ and so, so satisfying, and it’s really not what Jaskier should be concentrating on right now.

The Faerie ( _not_ Faerie?) frowns at him, and says, “yeah, this Faerie skin. It isn’t mine.”

He opens his mouth, and then closes it again when he can’t think of a single thing to say. What can you _say_ to that?

What the fuck?

“What the fuck?” he says out loud. “How can your skin _not be yours?”_

The Faerie snickers. “What, you think I just go around looking like one of the Fae all the time?”

Jaskier gapes. “…kind of? Isn’t that how being a Faerie works?” _Isn’t that how being_ anything _works?_ What is he not getting, here?

The Faerie looks affronted. “I’m not a Faerie.”

Jaskier sits down very hard.

“Songbird,” the Faerie says to him, sounding _worried._ “Songbird—I thought you _knew.”_

 _How the fuck would he—_ he pauses, takes a breath, and then says, “no?” His voice breaks on the word.

The Faerie—the _not-_ Faerie pauses, and then says carefully, “you thought I was really a Fae.”

_Uh, yeah._

Jaskier shakes his head, but not in denial—he’s more shaking his head at this conversation. At the events that led him to this conversation. At every life choice he’s ever made that has brought him to this point. “Well, yeah,” he says, very reasonably, his voice misleadingly steady. “Why wouldn’t I? You look like one.”

The not-Faerie blinks, nonplussed. “Of course I do. It’s a glamour. To make sure anybody who came across me would run, rather than try and help. I thought I told you right at the very start. You—I ate your food and gave you that lute and didn’t try and _kill_ you when you stayed.”

 _Of course,_ he says. As though _anything_ about this situation makes sense. Jaskier wants to pace, but his head is spinning and he doesn’t want to fall over.

“You _did not tell me_ ,” he accuses. “You definitely didn’t. I would have _remembered_ something like that.

The Faerie scowls at him. “You asked me if I was going to eat you, and I told you know and asked why I’d do such a thing. And then—then I told you—” the Faerie breaks off, very obviously thinking hard, and then its expression shutters. “I didn’t tell you.”

Jaskier’s memory isn’t good enough to remember everything of that first conversation, but he’s absolutely certain that if the Faerie had mentioned _anything_ about not being a Faerie, he would remember. “Damn right you didn’t.”

The Faer—Not-Faerie frowns at him, and then says, “what the _hell_ did you think I was, then?”

Jaskier shakes his head again, trying to compile his thoughts into something that would make sense if he said them out loud. “No—I just kind of figured you were a good Faerie, or something.” Kind of. There’s a whole conversation on Jaskier’s near-mortally-bad bad life choices that he doesn’t really want to be having, so he says less than he means and hopes the Fa—the Not-Faerie doesn’t catch the hidden meaning.

The Not-Faerie closes its eyes, brows furrowing in frustration, and says, “there are no good Faeries.”

“Well—there’s _you!_ ” Jaskier hastens to defend, before realising that technically that statement is no longer true, and lamely finishes, “uh, not anymore, I guess. But—huh.” Jaskier, still reeling from the life-altering knowledge that his good friend the Faerie isn’t _actually_ a Faerie, doesn’t have a good point to make.

An expression of horror is slowly mounting on the not-Faerie’s face. “You—you really, genuinely thought I was a Faerie, and it took you _ages_ to trust me—you thought I was a fucking _Faerie,_ and you kept coming back anyway?” It looks thunderous. Jaskier winces. _This_ is the conversation he doesn’t want to be having.

“Uh, yeah?”

“You—did you not think that maybe I’d _eat you?”_

“Well—that was a consideration, yes—”

The Not-Faerie gapes at him. “Do you have single sense of self-preservation in your head?”

Jaskier pauses, and then says, “no.”

The Not-Faerie hums. The disapproval is scalding.

“So, um,” Jaskier casts around for a topic with which to break the horribly awkward silence that has descended upon them. “Could you tell me your name, now?”

The Not-Faerie frowns at him. “Songbird, I’ve told you—it isn’t safe.”

“Right—right, yeah, but, see, that’s _bullshit._ ‘Cos you’re not actually a Faerie who could steal my identity, or my face, or whatever, if I told you my name. So, I’m Jaskier.”

“What the _fuck—”_

“Julian Alfred Pankratz de Lettenhove, actually, if we’re being technical,” Jaskier barrels on, ignoring the Not-Faerie’s spat protests in favour of formally introducing himself. “But I hated that name so I changed it. And I guess we can ignore the Pankratz, too, since my father pretty much disowned me before I ended up stuck here when the apocalypse happened, so. It’s just Jaskier.”

The Not-Faerie looks close to a conniption. “Songbird—”

“— _Jaskier—”_

“—what the _fuck_ is wrong with you. Seriously. Do you _want_ to die?”

Jaskier shrugs. “I mean, we all die eventually, right? What are you even so afraid of?”

The Not-Faerie freezes. It— _he (_ it? He? Jaskier doesn’t want to assume, but the Fae don’t have genders as far as anybody can tell and this person apparently isn’t a Faerie and also _clearly_ is a ‘he’. So.) looks conflicted. “There are things you don’t know,” it says slowly.

“Yeah, no shit.”

The Not-Faerie shakes its—his head. “No, I mean—you probably think the Faerie’s invasion was just—an accident, or something.”

_Of course it was a fucking accident. What else could it be?_

When Jaskier opens his mouth to say something, he can’t think of a single thing other than, “ _what?”_

The Not-Faerie hums, and then says ever so cautiously, “it was a wizard. And also kind of Emhyr var Emreis, but he got duped too, in the end. So, it was mostly Vilgefortz.”

Jaskier knows one of those names. An emperor. That’s… that’s a _big_ name to just drop on him, and accuse of being somewhat responsible for the end of the fucking world, pretty much.

“Wh—this is—are you _sure?_ Just— _what?_ Why? Wh—you’re going to have to give me more here, because that’s—there’s not—” he gives up on trying to make sense, settling instead for fixing the Not-Faerie with the most perplexed stare he can manage, hoping for once he’ll take the hint and give him more information than just the bare minimum. All of this is… a _lot._

The Not-Faerie gingerly reaches out a hand, trying to keep his expression blank, but Jaskier can see in the tightness of its jaw that he’s worried Jaskier is going to bat his hand away, or something. Instead he reaches out and grabs onto it like a lifeline, squeezing tightly.

“Do you know what the Chapter is? The Brotherhood of Sorcerers?”

Jaskier waves a hand. “Pretty much. I studied at Oxenfurt—politics was one of those things. Where the fuck are _they_ right now? Seems like we could have used some magical intervention, oh, about two years ago. Give or take.”

The Not-Faerie shakes his head. “Trapped, like me, or hiding. They’re… it’s complicated,” he clams up again, expression going hard and unforgiving, and Jaskier glares.

“No. No—I’m fucking done with the—with the _secret keeping_ and the lying and you saying it’s all for my own protection. I could die _right now._ I could be ambushed by a Faerie as soon as I step out of this clearing. I could get on my horse _in_ this clearing and immediately be thrown, and crack my head open on the floor. Just—just tell me, because you keeping things from me is just leaving me in the dark without any idea of what to expect. And it _doesn’t help._ Besides, if you told me, maybe—maybe I could do something.”

He’s breathing hard by the time he finishes, fire in his eyes and between his teeth, and two years of helplessness come rocketing back to him as he and the Not-Faerie watch each other. He’s _sick_ of this. Even if there’s nothing he can do—he at least deserves to know _why_ all of this has happened. He deserves that much. And he’s not prepared to let the possibility of _knowing_ go so quickly.

“You don’t—if I tell you, you’ll know, and they’ll _hunt_ you,” the Not-Faerie growls out, but Jaskier isn’t cowed. Not this time.

“Are you sure?” he demands. “Because we’ve been sitting here for ages now, and nothing’s happened.” _Only that you’ve upheaved my world, basically, but neither of us has been systematically taken out, or anything._ He adds, “and besides—they’re already hunting me! Human has been on their menu since the _beginning_. At least now they’ll have a reason for it _other_ than just hunting me for sport.”

The Not-Faerie shakes his head. “No, they’ve been hunting for food. That’s different to hunting you because it’s personal. And there’s no reason for them to attack _right away_ ; they’ll wait until you leave.”

“The attacks have waned, recently. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

With a wince, the Not-Faerie absorbs this news and continues. “They’ve probably waned because they’re focusing somewhere else. So they’re not just hunting for food. Something must be fighting back—perhaps the elves, or some human king has—”

“Right. So they won’t be focusing on me.”

“No—this is just guessing! I don’t actually _know_ why they’re not attacking so much—maybe they just haven’t needed to attack _here_ recently, or maybe they’ve found a tastier source of food, or maybe some of them had to go home. Maybe they’ve figured out that hunting humans to extinction would be bad for them in the long run. We don’t _know._ I’m not risking you.”

Jaskier smiles sadly. “You’re _not_ risking me. _I’m_ risking me. Because—I can’t just sit in Lettenhove for the rest of my life, always wondering. Don’t make me do that.”

In the end, that’s what does it. A small, heartfelt little plea.

The Not-Faerie pauses, apparently collecting his thoughts, and then speaks. “They—there was a coup. Emhyr var Emreis was losing the war with the North, and needed to get rid of them—the Chapter. So he contracted Vilgefortz.”

Jaskier nods along. He has no real inclination for politics, but his tutors had banged it into his head when he was a child and Oxenfurt continued that education, and he was aware of the war as a distant thing that his father argued about and Marek thought about signing up for.

The Not-Faerie continues. “Vilgefortz is… unstable, to summarise it. He was only supposed to take out the opposing mages in the Brotherhood so that Emhyr could advance the war—instead he summoned a Seelie Queen, tried to bend her to his will so he could take out the Brotherhood _and_ Emhyr, and… well. Failed.” The Not-Faerie heaves in a sigh, and Jaskier is suddenly left wondering just _how_ he knows all of this. Whether he was there.

“She got him to open a gate, to let all of her kind through, and now they’re here and the only one who can send them back and _close_ the gate is Vilgefortz, and he’s mad and missing.”

Jaskier sits back. Then he lays back, the grass cushioning his head, and tries to think.

After a minute, he says lightly, “all of that, and you still can’t tell me your name?”

There’s a sigh, and then: “Geralt.”

Jaskier tilts his head to look at the Not-Faerie. At _Geralt._ “Seriously?”

He looks annoyed, now. “ _Seriously,_ what?”

“ _Geralt?”_ Jaskier smirks. “Just—it’s very plebeian.”

The not— _Geralt_ gapes at him. “ _Plebeian?_ The fuck do you mean—”

“Just, you’re this big, bad Not-Faerie—what are you, actually? You’re not human—and your name is _Geralt._ That’s just—”

“Wow. Fuck you.”

“I don’t mean to be rude! Just—”

“How is calling somebody a plebeian considered _not rude,_ Jaskier.”

“I—okay, yeah,” Jaskier winces. “That was bad. But you called me by my name!”

The— _Geralt_ tilts his head and twitches his mouth in a way that suggests he’s trying not to smile. “Bit different to the laundry list you call your other name.”

“Hey! I can’t help being born into the nobility. And I hated every one of the fuckers anyway, so you can get off your high horse—”

“ _Julian Alfred Pankratz de Lettenhove,”_ Geralt says, with a smug satisfaction that lights up his face and causes Jaskier to fall silent.

“Yeah,” he replies, when it becomes clear that Geralt is waiting for him to say something. “It _is_ a mouthful, isn’t it? My father hated that I changed my name. But fuck him, anyway.” There’s a bitterness to his tone he hadn’t expected. Geralt cocks his head at it, but doesn’t push.

“Anyway! Anyway. You still haven’t told me what you are.” Jaskier does his best to just brush past the moment, and Geralt, thankfully, lets him.

“Why are you so sure that I’m not human? You do realise now that this isn’t what I actually look like, right?”

“Because you’re five hundred million years old. Also, you’re taking all of this magic bullshit really well. I know that if _I_ had the power to turn into a wolf, I would not be this subdued about it.”

Geralt’s lips quirk into a tiny smile. “I’m admitting to nothing.”

“ _Geralt._ Come on. You know that I’m human!”

Geralt rolls his eyes. “It’s not the same thing. Human is the norm. Human is the _safe_ thing to be.”

“Well, normally I’d agree with you,” Jaskier says seriously, “but at the moment there’s kind of an apocalypse happening, if you hadn’t noticed. Being human at the moment isn’t very safe at _all.”_

Geralt eyes him, deliberating, and then confesses, “I’m a witcher.”

…Not what he was expecting.

Jaskier boggles. “That’s—wow. I heard you were all evil monsters.”

Geralt gives him a hard look. “You and the rest of the fucking Continent,” he says, voice cold and hard and offended, and Jaskier realises he’s made a misstep.

“Ah—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—well. I suppose I just don’t know very much about witchers. I’ve never really… given them much thought, beyond what everyone knows. Or assumes.”

Geralt glares at him several heartbeats longer before relenting. “It’s—yeah. I know. And we really fucked up when the Faeries came through. The Schools should have banded together—but we were still fighting about whether we should step in with Emhyr and Vilgefortz, and by the time we realised what was going on it was too late to do anything. Witchers and politics don’t mix,” he adds, voice low, and Jaskier can’t help but snort derisively.

“Geralt, you’ve been involved with probably every political dispute in the last two hundred years _singlehandedly._ I don’t think you can say you’re not involved in politics.”

Geralt scowls at him. “I’m not two hundred years old. And it wasn’t _every_ political dispute,” he tacks on, voice quiet, like he realises that that isn’t the best argument he could make.

Jaskier just shakes his head; he can’t quite fight off the fond little smile. “A witcher,” he muses. “Hadn’t expected that. How’s it feel to look like one of the monsters you’re meant to be killing?”

Geralt sighs. “You are just the authority on putting your foot in your mouth, aren’t you.” It’s not a question.

“If you don’t know that about me by now, I don’t even know what to say.”

Geralt rolls his eyes, but he isn’t demanding an apology so Jaskier figures he’s in the clear. Then he says, “they’ll know you know, now.” And though Jaskier _knew_ this this would be the case—whoever ‘they’ are, and he can’t decide if it’s better or worse that he doesn’t know—it still sends a frisson of fear down his spine.

“Who are ‘they’, anyway?” he asks, absentmindedly reaching down to pluck grass from the ground, weaving the longer pieces together.

“The Fae. Not all of them are mindless, bloodthirsty animals; they have a hierarchy. They did it to all the witchers—isolated us, trapped us. Triss—a witch, and a friend—gave me the wolf spell, said it would mask my smell for a little while, hopefully let me out for long enough to try and _do_ something. It’s all she could do before she had to run.”

Jaskier nods slowly, piecing things together. “So—not everybody’s dead? There’s people out there who can help?”

Geralt fixes him with a strange look. “Yes. But—we’re scattered. And we’re outnumbered. And the Fae can jump between worlds as they please, while their portal is open—we’d never stand a chance, even if we were altogether.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, avoiding touching his horns, and his tail lashes impatiently across the ground. It’s the first time Jaskier’s really _looked_ at him and seen how the pieces of him don’t really fit together.

Jaskier focuses back on their problem. ( _Their._ That makes it sound so small—it’s not _their_ problem, it’s the whole fucking Continent’s problem—the _world’s_ problem. Jaskier has never felt so isolated as he does now—and yet, strangely, he feels connected to strangers he’s never met before, and will never know he exists.)

“So we just—we close the portal, find and bring everyone together, and get rid of the Fae.” _Easy_ , he doesn’t say, because it sounds impossible.

Geralt is giving him a strange look. “See how it can never happen?” he says, and Jaskier scoffs.

“You’ve quit before you’ve even _tried._ Come on, there must be something. I thought the whole point of your wolf thing was to be a disguise. Surely you can go round everybody up? I’m sure that together the lot of you can overwhelm Vilgefortz before the Fae get their teeth into you.”

“No—I’ve been trying, but the wolf form only throws them off for so long before they catch my scent. That’s what happened yesterday—I went too far, and I wasn’t close enough to my brother’s Ring to be safe there, and I was too far from this one to get back unscathed.” Geralt scratches a hand over his side, where the claw marks had raked through his pelt yesterday evening and Jaskier had spent hours stitching them closed. He wonders if Geralt can still feel them.

“So—what? They caught a whiff of your magic or something? Maybe you should just bathe _really_ well beforehand,” Jaskier jokes, and grins unrepentantly at the glare Geralt throws his way. “I’m serious. If there’re fewer of them, what are they hunting for? Could _I_ get away with going out there?”

“No,” Geralt says, but it’s after a beat too long of silence wherein Jaskier realises there’s something Geralt isn’t telling him.

“ _What_ ,” he prods, reaching forward to tug at Geralt’s arm. He sighs, but allows Jaskier to pull his hand into his lap, atop the failed attempts of grass weaving that have collected there.

“What about the solstice?” Jaskier asks, when Geralt isn’t forthcoming. At the witcher’s confused look, he explains, “you were allowed out on the summer solstice, right? Cos you’re not a Faerie, but this is still a Faerie Ring—I guess, anyway, I mean, it _looks_ like one—so it opened then and let you out in your—er, Faerie form. You didn’t have to… y’know, _go wolf,_ to be let out. Why didn’t they hunt you then? Could you wait until the next one and then go round up the other witchers, the sorcerers who aren’t batshit insane, take Vilgefortz out?”

Geralt is shaking his head before Jaskier even finishes. “No—the solstices are when the Fae are most powerful, it’s why the Faerie Ring opens in the first place. They didn’t come after me because they didn’t _need_ to. Even if every single person who could potentially be a threat to them got together to fight them, we’d still lose. They’re just more powerful than us.”

It’s a sobering thought. It’s a _terrifying_ thought. Jaskier looks down, idly cataloguing Geralt’s callouses while his mind works.

“Okay, so—not the solstice, then. And not your wolf. What about _me_? I could do it, right?”

“ _No,”_ Geralt snaps, tugging his hand back and fixing Jaskier with a severe glare. “It’s—it’s _too dangerous._ They’re not outright hunting humans anymore—they don’t really need to, and they’ve killed so many of you off already—but if they catch even just your _scent_ you’d be dead.”

Jaskier scowls. “I’m not actually inept. You wouldn’t be fighting me this hard if you didn’t think there was a chance of it working.”

“There _isn’t_ a chance—”

“Don’t bullshit me, Geralt; you told me you couldn’t do it, and you were sickeningly level-headed about it even though I know it has to be killing you. As soon as I suggest _me_ doing it you lose it. You have to have some idea of how I might do it or you wouldn’t be so passionate about stopping me.”

For several minutes, they glare at one another, silently daring the other to stand down, before Geralt _gives in._ He closes his eyes and heaves out the heaviest sigh Jaskier has ever heard, and then says, “you _could_ , I think, manage it. There’s… someone. Who could help. You’re human—completely, utterly human—”

“ _Hey,_ ” Jaskier objects, because it’s true, but it doesn’t need to sound like an _insult._

“—so there are a few very basic runes I can show you that will mask your scent almost completely, as long as you’re not in the same room as a Faerie, or something. They’re old magic, so the Fae won’t really be looking for them, or will just ignore them as some forgotten relic of before humans came to the Continent, or something. And before you actually went to Vilgefortz I’d send you to—my brothers, I think, and—well, you’d see. But it’s still—if you died out there I’d _never know_ and I’d be stuck here just _waiting_ —”

“Hey—hey, Geralt, it’s—c’mon, don’t talk like that. I _can_ look after myself,” Jaskier interjects, reaching out to grab Geralt’s hand again and hold it tightly to him. The witcher cuts off with a growl.

“Jaskier, you tried to befriend a _Faerie._ That’s—I’d actually call that pretty solid proof you _can’t_ look after yourself.”

Jaskier swats him, but he doesn’t really have an argument to that. Instead he says, “I’ve survived for two years already. I’ve managed to keep about three dozen other people, along with all our animals, alive for two years as well. I’m not _helpless._ And this is more important than any of us—I _can_ be careful. And once I find the others, I won’t be alone, right? You know them.”

Geralt looks pensive, as though there’s something he wants to say but won’t, and Jaskier doesn’t push him. He just holds Geralt’s hand, and waits.

His heartbeat is remarkably steady—talking about this, about _saving the world_ , he would have assumed that he’d be shaking with adrenaline, with the dizzying prospect of going out there and _doing_ something. About potentially dying. About _probably_ dying, if he’s being honest. Instead his hands are steady and his head is remarkably clear as he waits for Geralt to think the proposal over.

He doesn’t really know what he’s signing up for—a hard slog across the Continent, most likely, dodging the Fae, searching for other witchers or mages or whoever, and having to hunt and gather his own food, for the most part. He doesn’t want to risk visiting other human settlements, if he can avoid it—much as he’d like to visit others, and see how the rest of the Continent has fared, it’s too likely that people will try to stop him, or lock him up for insanity, or otherwise attack him, driving him away from their homes. It’s what he would do, if a stranger suddenly turned up one day in Lettenhove.

That, or he’d assume they were another ploy of the Fae, and have them killed.

He trembles, very, very slightly, because at the moment he probably can’t even _imagine_ how difficult this is going to be.

“Can you fight? Or at least defend yourself?” Geralt breaks the silence, and Jaskier is jerked out of his reverie.

“I was trained in swords, as a child. And I can fight dirty, although I don’t think that’s going to work against a Fae,” he muses, while Geralt runs a critical eye over Jaskier.

He hums. “I suppose as long as you can defend yourself, you’ll be fine,” he allows, and Jaskier rolls his eyes at Geralt’s absolutely boundless enthusiasm.

“This—this is happening, then,” he says, as it begins to hit him. _This is happening._

Geralt hums again. “Only if you want to,” he says seriously, “because—”

“—Stop,” Jaskier interrupts. “Just—just stop. _This is happening._ Don’t let me talk myself out of it, because I’ll regret it forever. Just… let me process. What will I need?”

They plan until early afternoon, deciding what Jaskier will need to take, and who he’ll meet with. Geralt teaches him the runes, and Jaskier hates the crawling feeling of the magic fizzling under his skin, the rune inky and heavy and weirdly oily where it sits on his skin, and he scrubs it off with relief when Geralt deems him able to.

They make a list of everybody who would feasibly help him: Geralt’s brothers, Eskel and Lambert and Coёn; Vesemir, the old wolf; Triss and Yennefer, the witches (and there’s a whole story with that last one that Jaskier desperately wants to poke at, but won’t). There are others that Geralt names that he thinks might be dead, or else lost, and Jaskier squeezes his hand tightly and wonders how anybody could ever say that witchers don’t feel emotions.

“You’ll go to Kaer Morhen,” Geralt tells him. “Where I was trained. The home of the witchers. It’s the only place I can think of where I _know_ somebody will be there. Vesemir. He’ll know how to help you more—you’ll need to find Yennefer, and she’s tricky, or Triss, except Vesemir is more likely to know where Yennefer is than her.”

 _Kaer Morhen._ Jaskier’s heard of it—of course he’s _heard_ of it—but he never thought he’d see it. Never thought he’d _go_ there.

A thought suddenly occurs to him.

“Oh fuck,” he says out loud, because this is the kind of thought that warrants it.

Geralt looks alarmed. “Don’t—they’re nice—well, generally—but anyway, they won’t hurt you—”

“Geralt,” Jaskier interrupts, waving him off. “I’m about to travel through Fae-infested territory to fucking _Kaer Morhen._ Your family doesn’t scare me. It’s _mine_ that I’m worried about—I don’t know how the fuck I’m going to explain any of this.”

* * *

In the end, Jaskier leaves them a note.

Well, it’s a two page letter, but he’s already consumed by guilt and telling himself that he just left them a _note_ makes him feel worse, and if he’s feeling so guilty it makes him want to be sick then he can’t be consumed by the terror he feels lurking, ready to drag him into immobility.

He addresses the note to Marek, even though he knows it’ll be read by Gabriela and Hanna and Zofia, too, when she’s old enough, if he hasn’t returned.

It’s two pages long, but the gist of it is _I love you, and I’m sorry, and I know you don’t understand and there’s too many things that I don’t have time to explain, but I have to do this. I promise I haven’t been lured away by Faeries. If I don’t come back, know that I died trying to do something important. Be safe._ He tells them what really happened to father, and the ink on the page is smudged from the single tear he wasn’t able to hold back, and he’s devastated that he’s leaving them after they’ve just lost Juliusz, too, but he _needs_ to do this.

It hurt him to write, and it hurts him to leave it on his bed, where he knows they’ll go looking for him.

The horse he’s taken is the placid white gelding who dumped him at Geralt’s feet, that very first time they met. The poet in Jaskier is supremely satisfied by this.

Jaskier has half of Redania and a mountain range and the entirety of Kaedwen to cross—on foot, it would take him a few months to navigate the terrain, with no towns at which to buy supplies and an army of Faeries who wouldn’t hesitate to kill him on sight. On horseback, it will be a matter of weeks.

The road is long and hard and Jaskier hasn’t left Lettenhove in _years._ He’s excited and he’s terrified and he’s almost certain that he’s going to die.


	11. Chapter 11

In retrospect, Jaskier should probably have seen this coming.

The rain is hammering down _hard;_ far-off, thunder threatens to cleave the sky apart with its deafening roar; on the ground, the earth is slowly becoming a swamp, and there’s a very deep pit and Jaskier is _in_ it.

There are runes and wards carved into stones embedded into the muddy walls, that make him think it was built for the Fae. With its ten-feet walls and no apparent handholds, and a floor that becomes less and less solid with every passing minute of the storm, it’s also highly effective for holding humans, too.

When he’d first fallen in, Jaskier had felt a little flash of pride for his fellow humans—a week out of Lettenhove, and he’s seen no sign of other human civilisation even though, a few years ago, he probably would have by this point. No; he’d seen _nothing_ , and then he’d been foraging some berries from a bush, and then he’d taken a step and now he’s at the bottom of a pit, obviously built by human hands.

So he’s proud of his fellow man, and he’s glad that there are other survivors out there, fighting back, but…

He’s currently in _very real_ danger of drowning, and there’s not much he can do about it.

His supplies are all tied to his horse somewhere above him, and he’s soaked through to the skin and standing knee-high in mud that’s becoming deeper by the minute, and the walls are slick and getting slicker, mud washing down them in torrents.

It gives Jaskier an idea.

The carved stones shoved into the walls are for the express purpose of keeping Fae in, but they won’t have any effect on Jaskier. He doesn’t know how stable they are, or if they’ll just crumble under his hands the second he tries putting any weight on them, but he does know that if he does _nothing_ then he’ll be stuck here.

He’s done stupider things, he muses, eyeing the stones and deliberating which are best-placed for him to climb out. They seem to be hammered into the wall at random, and there’s enough of them that he _thinks_ he won’t run into a dead-end (if he makes it more than a few feet off the ground, that it), so with a fortifying, heaving inhale he grabs onto the first stone spike and pulls himself up.

He falls _twice._ The first time is a shock—he’s about halfway up, when the stone spike under his foot suddenly comes loose, falling to the floor of the pit and immediately being absorbed by the quagmire that is now the ground, swiftly followed by himself. He isn’t prepared for how _icy_ it feels against his skin, how the mud leeches the warmth from him and leaves him shivering.

The second time, he instigates himself, preferring to fall again than try pulling himself up with a stone spike that is already so loose that Jaskier can _see_ it sliding further from its channel with each hammering minute of rain, so he turns and leaps inelegantly to the ground. The sucking, freezing mud isn’t a shock this time—rather it is so appalling that Jaskier has to take a moment just to breathe through the cloying distress, before he can turn back to the wall and try again.

Now, he’s _nearly_ over the lip of the pit—close enough that when he reaches his hand up, he can touch the waterlogged grass that grows by its edge—when a hand grasps his wrist and hauls him out.

“ _Fuck,”_ he gasps, landing unceremoniously on the ground. If there had been an inch of him before that hadn’t been slathered in mud, that’s no longer the case.

Somebody’s saying something to him, but Jaskier has his eyes squeezed shut and is just trying to _breathe._

 _Fuck, fuck, fuck._ He could have died! In some random _pit!_ Oh, what an ignominious death, considering what he’d set out to do.

“—you okay?” he suddenly hears, his ears deciding to switch back on, and now he can hear the rain coming down harder and the thunder _right above them_ and his own heartbeat, louder than anything else, pounding in his ears.

“Yeah,” he gasps out, answering the question he hopes they asked, considering he only heard the last few words. “I’m—fuck, I’m fine. Uh, who—who are you?”

He looks up, then, futilely wiping at his face to try and stop mud dripping into his eyes. His gelding is there, looking half-drowned and bedraggled, held by a mounted warrior with a long, evil-looking halberd clasped in one hand, the horse beneath them unbridled and looking equally sodden. On the ground beside them stand two other soldiers, armoured both, swords crossed over their backs and wearing helms that cover their faces. The water comes off their armour in sheets, and Jaskier feels a somewhat sympathetic towards them for the veritable pool of water that must have dripped through the joints of the metal and soaked into their skin.

Directly above him stands the warrior who’d hauled him up; they’re armed, just as the others are, and Jaskier can’t see their expression past the metal covering their face.

“We live nearby, on the plains,” the soldier hedges. Jaskier doesn’t pay it any mind. He wouldn’t be particularly forthcoming, either, if their roles were reversed. “Are you hurt?” they ask instead.

“No,” he says after a brief mental investigation. He’d fallen twice and he’s covered so thickly in mud they probably can’t see very much of him, but he isn’t _hurt._ “Just wet and cold.” _And I can feel mud sliding into places where mud shouldn’t be._

“Well, we can fix those things,” the soldier tells him cheerily. “Come back with us. We’ll feed you and give you a fire to sleep by. Haven’t seen anybody new since the beginning of all this; do you have any news?”

And, oh, Jaskier wants to. He _wants_ to. He wants to go back with these people to their camp and sit and eat and bathe and sleep, but…

He’s not so stupid nor naïve as to trust them, and he’s not so stupid nor naïve as to believe that _they_ trust _him._ He needs to sleep, and he won’t do it in the company of strangers.

“Thank you for your kind offer,” he says, “and for saving me, but I think it would be best if we went our separate ways.” Behind them, the two unmounted soldiers shift uneasily. The warrior before him watches him for a moment more before shrugging.

“It’s your decision,” they say, “but we’ve no reason to harm you. Those runes down there will hold a Fae for at least a week, and we checked these traps just yesterday. You wouldn’t have gotten out if you weren’t human.”

“Humans can still be dangerous,” Jaskier reasons, eyeing them distrustfully. He wishes they’d just let it go, because he knows if they argue much more then he’ll give in, and he promised Geralt he’d be careful. He _has_ to be careful.

“Aye, they can,” the soldier agrees. “But there’re monsters out there fouler than anything we’ve ever known, and they don’t care if we’re good or bad; seems like humans shouldn’t, either, if we’re to survive.”

It’s an awkward way of speaking, and Jaskier has to take a moment to parse the man’s meaning before his shoulders slump and he nods. “You’ve nothing to worry about from me,” he tries to reassure, and the soldier nods at him. Whether they believe him is another matter—he can’t see any of their faces, but the footsoldiers standing beside the cavalryman both visibly tense when he walks by them to collect his horse.

The gelding blinks rain-soaked lashes at him and reaches forward to sniff his hair, managing to wipe its grey nose on his face, thus covering itself in slime and filth. Jaskier scowls at it when it pulls away, obviously pleased with itself. “You’re a pest,” he grumbles, taking the reins from the mounted soldier and quickly checking the gelding over, marking a few small nicks and eyeing the state of its shoes.

“What’s his name?” one of the soldiers asks. Jaskier wonders if they realise they’ve asked his horse’s name before they asked for his own.

“He doesn’t have one,” he shrugs, reaches up to scratch the gelding behind the ears.

“Poor boy deserves a name.”

Jaskier just smiles. Naming the horse means getting attached to it. And he’s managed to half-convince himself that if he refrains from naming it, it’ll survive this whole endeavour, because the gods only take from him the things he cares about.

“We should get going,” the mounted soldier interrupts, and the one who’d helped Jaskier out of the pit nods.

They set off with little further conversation, all of them tired and cold and miserable under the relentless rain, Jaskier leading his horse from the ground and wincing at every squelching footstep.

* * *

Their camp is built in and around an old, apparently abandoned, farmhouse. Jaskier is given a cot in a small room upstairs, apparently having displaced another man to go share a larger bedroom with two others. There’s a washtub downstairs and a merry fire going and he’s able to have a hot bath for the first time in a week, and the feeling of sinking into the steaming water is absolutely worth the harrowing experience of having to use a pail of frigid riverwater to wash the mud off of himself outside, helping the three other men he’d returned with scrub the slime out of their hair.

It’s a moment of familiarity and camaraderie that pierces his heart. He’d _missed_ this. These small connections with strangers, the utter humanity of being kind just for the _sake_ of it that they had lost when everybody had retreated into their own communities.

That night, a band of women join them in the house, two small children at their feet, and a pack of dogs that greet Jaskier with an enthusiasm that bowls him over and has him laughing breathlessly until the dogs are dragged away, still wiggling with excitement.

“Where are you from?” they ask him, pushing stew and bread into his hands, rapt with attention.

“Lettenhove,” he answers, between bites of bread. “The other side of Redania. There are about thirty of us there, and six children.”

“I can’t imagine seeing thirty people,” one woman says, shaking her head. A small child is clutching her leg, staring at him with wide eyes. These people are all she has ever known. “I can’t imagine trying to _feed_ thirty people. How do you all not go mad?”

“We have farmland, and animals, and got canny about keeping them from the Fae,” Jaskier explains. Then, without really knowing why, he says, “we recently celebrated the midsummer.” He smiles down at his bowl, remembering dancing with Geralt. That’s not a story he can share here, but it’s a fond memory. “We had this _huge_ bonfire—bigger than you’ve ever seen—and surrounded it with smaller ones, and went jumping over them for luck. We danced and had music and got horrendously drunk. It’s one of the first times since all of this began that—well.” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but he doesn’t have to; everybody is already nodding their heads, envious.

“Attacks have dropped off, by us,” one man offers, eyeing him hopefully. When Jaskier looks at him to meet his gaze his eyes drop away, furtive, and Jaskier just manages not to shake his head. How will all of them cope, when this is over?

“They have where we are, too,” he tells them. “I’ve seen a few while travelling, but my runes keep me hidden.”

“Runes?” one woman asks, her gaze hungry.

He hums. “They’re old, and I don’t know what they mean, and I don’t know if I could teach them to you. They were given to me by… someone else,” he hedges, realising he can’t just come out and say _witcher_ to these people. To the people of Jaskier’s village, witchers are as bad as the Fae—inhuman monsters who’d abandoned them in their time of need.

“Another traveller?” one man prods.

“…yes,” Jaskier says. “He, uh—he didn’t tell me very much about himself. Just that they’d hide me from view, or something.” He doesn’t like lying to these people, but he doesn’t trust them. “I couldn’t stay there anymore—seeing fields and forests and roads in the distance that I couldn’t walk down; it was driving me mad. So I left.”

“I can understand the feeling,” the hungry-looking woman murmurs, her gaze sharp where she stares at her feet, obviously thinking about something else. There are murmurs of agreement all around the room. Abruptly, the woman looks up at him and asks, “where are you going to?”

Jaskier considers how much he can tell her, before hesitantly answering, “at the moment, I’m just looking to cross the mountains into Kaedwen. After that… who knows? Perhaps north,” he mentions offhandedly, thinking of the trek he still has to make to reach Kaer Morhen.

“I visited the Blue Mountains once, on the far side of Kaedwen,” one man offers, and Jaskier tries not to look too obviously interested.

“Oh?” he prompts, when the man doesn’t continue talking. He looks up at Jaskier then, frowning, before his expression clears and he smiles wryly.

He hums. “Everybody speaks of how tall they are, but you don’t really understand until you’re _there,_ in the foothills, and you look up and then _keep_ looking up, and behind them there are more mountains and then more mountains after that. Why anybody tried travelling past them, I’ll never understand.”

Jaskier finishes his mug of water. They’d offered him ale, but he knows well that ale is difficult to replace if you don’t have the right tools or ingredients, and he’d refused, to their ill-concealed relief.

“Perhaps I’ll go have a look,” he murmurs quietly, and the conversation moves on.

* * *

That night, he lays sleeplessly on his cot, his mind racing as he considers how many hundreds (or maybe _thousands)_ of small communes and hamlets might have sprung up across the Continent. He desperately wants to visit a city, to see how they have fared. He desperately wants to go home, to see his family. He desperately wants to be at Kaer Morhen already, so they can begin _fixing_ this.

He wants Geralt in his arms again. His friend, his… something more, perhaps, given time.

The rain hammers on the roof, and the building is full of the quiet sounds of other people sleeping. He rolls over and pulls the blanket over his head.

* * *

Leaving the next morning is bittersweet.

At the beginning, he’d been afraid that strangers would be wary and aggressive, that coming across them would spell only trouble. He certainly knows how _he_ would react, if strange men were to creep out of the trees and ask for shelter.

These people have not reacted like that. They’ve welcomed him into their _home_ , have offered him food and a bed and company for the evening, and the morning is still and solemn as he tacks up his gelding, the quiet noises of the other horses in the small barn hidden away amongst the trees lulling him into a sense of calm.

“You’re going, then?” he hears behind him; turning his head, he sees the sharp, hungry-eyed woman from last night, keenly eyeing the saddlebags he’s strapping to his horse.

He hums. “Can’t stay forever,” he points out.

“No,” she murmurs quietly, a little bitterly. He waits to see if she has anything else to say, and, when nothing else is forthcoming, he turns back to his horse, smoothing his fingers under the edge of the saddle blanket to check for creases.

“Could you take me with you?”

He stops, lets go of the gelding, and turns to appraise her. Her face is flushed, her gaze hard, and when she sees him looking she lifts her chin and doesn’t try to apologise for her outburst.

“You don’t even know my name,” he reminds her; she looks unconvinced.

“Easily fixed.”

His lips curve into a smile. “I can’t bring you with me,” he says, a touch of finality lending weight to his words, and she shakes her head in denial.

“You can. I want to travel, too. I want _more._ I can—I can fight, and hunt, and cook, and look after the horses, and—”

“You can’t come with me,” he interrupts her, “because I’m not _only_ travelling. I—” he stops, trying to figure out how to finish, wondering what he can tell her that won’t have all the people here up in arms against him.

She frowns. “What the fuck does that even mean? Not _only_ travelling? You’re—what, you’re going somewhere? You madman, there’s nowhere to go _to—”_

This time she cuts herself off, upon seeing the expression on his face. This time Jaskier closes his eyes rather than see the look of incredulity pinch her features.

“I’m trying to—there might be something I can do, to _fix_ all of this,” he tells her, eyes still closed. She doesn’t say anything. “I know it sounds mad, and sketchy as shit, but—”

“Go, then,” she tells him, her voice hard, and when he opens his eyes to look at her she just looks resigned. “Go, then,” she repeats, and he wants to say more, wants to explain, but he can hear footsteps on the cobblestone floor of the barn and there’s no time, anyway.

“Leaving so soon?” another woman calls, and Jaskier tugs on a strap a little harder, just for emphasis.

“Not to deprive you lovely ladies of my company,” he tells the woman as she comes into view from the stall, leaning on the door beside the previous woman. Where she had been hard lines and wanderlust and the biting, furious indignation at being forced to _stay_ , this new woman is easy smiles and loose limbs and a flirty wink tossed carelessly at him.

“A damn shame,” she agrees, and the first woman scoffs, all of her limbs tensing until she’s so rigid that Jaskier’s afraid she’ll snap. He wants to say something, but before he can think of anything _to_ say she’s already stalking away, frustration evident in the harsh hunch of her shoulders.

The new woman watches her go, then turns back to Jaskier, quirking her brows wryly. “Let me guess,” she says, “she wanted you to take her with you?”

Jaskier hesitates, then admits, “yeah. Had to disappoint her.”

“She’s like a cat. Wants to prowl. Was used all her life to travelling, never had a home she settled down in—now she’s been here for two years and it’s driving her insane.” Jaskier grimaces in sympathy, and the woman nods with a tight smile, and the silence becomes very briefly awkward before she apparently remembers why she’s here, and thrusts a woven sack towards him.

“For you,” the woman explains, “bread and cheese and some fruit. Things you can’t buy anymore.”

Jaskier looks wordlessly down at the bag, unsure how he can reject the gift without causing offence, before looking up and meeting the gaze of the woman, his unspoken question in his eyes. She rolls her own and grins.

“We can afford to give some food away to a weary traveller,” she tells him. “We’ll be alright. Just… look after yourself, alright?” 

Jaskier’s a poet. He’s a singer. A minstrel. He graduated _summa cum laude_ from Lettenhove in the Seven Liberal Arts.

Looking at this stranger, who’s been so kind to him for no other reason than the sake of being kind, he can’t think of a single thing to say.

Instead, he quietly thanks her, bids her farewell, then takes the sack of food and ties it onto his gelding. He mounts up, riding out of barn into the brisk morning air. He points his horse towards the mountains.

* * *

Jaskier crosses the mountains and nearly dies about a hundred times.

His scent is picked up by a Faerie, and he spends a hair-raising three days riding up a mountain river, the icy water chilling him and his horse to the bone and hopefully washing away their scent. The nights are freezing and during the days his skin burns where the sun reaches him, despite the relative chill of the air, and the ground is treacherous beneath his horse’s hooves.

The morning on which he begins his descent down the mountains, on a pig-track towards Kaedwen, he hears a hair-raising yowl that echoes off the surrounding peaks and has him leaping into his saddle before his horse has even lifted its head. He urges it into a trot and then a canter, figuring that it won’t matter if his horse breaks its leg because the Faerie will catch and eat them anyway, and a trip down the mountain that would have taken him two days at the careful pace he had set they manage to finish before nightfall, mainly by scrambling down slopes at a speed fast enough to have his heart in his throat and prayers to gods that he doesn’t believe in fresh on his tongue.

They escape the Faerie by the skin of their teeth. Jaskier wards his camp that night with every rune he knows, written in his own blood and sprinkled with salt and holly berries, and he hangs iron bells and adder stones and totems of ash wood and other trinkets he doesn’t know will work and he sleeps restlessly, snapping awake every half-hour from a nightmare in which he dreams that he awakens to a Faerie leering at him.

His horse is sore the next morning, moving stiffly, and Jaskier sacrifices another day to stand with it in the freezing water of a mountain stream, applying what poultices he can with the herbs and plants he can identify, and praying that the swelling in the gelding’s legs are due to the hard run it had yesterday and not a hairline fracture.

He’s lucky, so incredibly lucky, that they didn’t lose a metal horseshoe on their mad scramble downwards.

They set off again the next day, his horse springy and ready to run, Jaskier paranoid and tense in the saddle until the gelding spooks at a bird and he has to relax enough to calm his mount down.

The landscape of Kaedwen is different to Redania, in that it is largely comprised of forests and requires Jaskier to dismount and lead his horse for long stretches, weaving through dense forests and navigating leagues of briars. When the land opens up into open plains, both Jaskier and the gelding relish the chance to stretch their legs into a gallop, flying across the fields, eating up the miles.

Summer is still heavy on the land and the days are bright and sweating, and Jaskier drips under the harsh, unrelenting glare of the sun. During the evenings, a ruthless chill creeps across the land, permeating the air and seeping into the ground, finding him no matter how densely he packs his nests and setting his teeth chattering. It’s a difficult game, deciding how to split the blankets between himself and his horse, and the balance he strikes leaves both of them cold but not shivering; they’re at least able to sleep through the night.

The worst part of the whole endeavour is the constant, relentless threat of a Fae attack. The fear of it is a permanent consideration in Jaskier’s mind, and he’s never, ever able to forget it. If it weren’t for the apocalypse of monsters currently laying waste to the land and the human population, all of this travelling would be nearly _enjoyable_ —he’d often dreamt of taking his lute and his horse and hitting the open road, playing for coin at taverns and inns and sleeping rough by the roadside, the constant thrill of adventure fuelling his writing.

This journey isn’t anything like that.

He sleeps with one eye open, jerking awake every time the quiet noises of the forest cease and silence becomes just a little too oppressive, and he’s jittery and nervous in the saddle, even while he desperately tries to calm himself, so as to keep the gelding from spooking.

He learns to listen not for the footfalls or the quiet breaths of Faeries, but for the silence of the forest, where the Faeries hide.

They’re an apex predator; they are far, far too good at stalking their prey, at moving soundlessly, for him to ever hear them coming. Instead he listens for the forest animals falling silent around them, hiding away in their dens, alerting their families to the danger in their midst.

More than once, when he’s riding along a game trail or through a river or, a few times, when he’s been on foot and has to scramble hastily into the saddle, he hears the calls of forest creatures and the singing of birds and the near-silent footfalls of animals through the underbrush drop away, silence drifting through the trees like smoke.

It’s _then_ that he knows to run, cantering and galloping past tree trunks, through brooks; once over a rocky outcropping, slippery and covered in loose ground, that leaves Jaskier shivering with adrenaline and latent terror. He doesn’t stop until around him he can hear the quiet noises of the forest.

His gelding, by the grace of all the gods that he doesn’t believe in, never faulters. He runs but doesn’t bolt, and is footsure even over the worst terrain. Jaskier lives in fear of hearing the metallic _clank_ of a shoe tearing free of a hoof, but it never happens. The gelding is a steady, gently presence by his side, offering support and companionship and a willing ear, and Jaskier struggles with guilt for not giving it a name—he’s half convinced that if he _does_ name it, then something awful will happen and his steed will be gone, so. The gelding remains ‘gelding’ when Jaskier talks to it, and it continues to save his life every day.

* * *

By the time the ragged peaks of the Blue Mountains show up on the horizon, nearly three and a half weeks have passed since Jaskier left Lettenhove, and he is further from home than he’s ever been. He’s in another _country._ This is a land he’s never seen before, beside mountains that climb higher than anything he’s ever known, under a sky that is familiar and yet foreign in ways he can’t quite define.

The Blue Mountains are the edge of Jaskier’s world.

Beyond them lie Haakland and Zerrikania, and any unnamed country inbetween—but they’re not where Jaskier is going. No; he’s heading for Kaer Morhen, marked out for him on a map by Geralt, and as he makes his way through Kaedwen to the dilapidated fortress he can’t help but grow more and more uneasy.

What will he find there?

Will there even _be_ anybody there?

Geralt had been so sure, and at this point Jaskier willingly trusts the witcher with his life, but…

A lot can change, in two years. A lot _has_ changed in two years, never mind the apocalypse. Geralt himself, incredible as he is, has only managed to stay as unscathed as he has—not lost in the land of the Fae, nor killed in this land of humans—because in the few moments that they had, a witch had given him a spell with which to hide himself.

If it had been… well, _anybody_ other than Jaskier to find him in that Faerie Ring, they would have tried to have him killed. Geralt is very, very good; Jaskier knows this from all the things that Geralt has survived—wars and coups and monsters the likes of which Jaskier never hopes to see—and if his village had attacked the witcher, Jaskier would have lost them all.

Or… Geralt would have made a different choice, and one of the few people left on the Continent who might have _done_ something about this occupation would be dead.

* * *

The day that he finds another Faerie Ring, Kaer Morhen in sight on the horizon and the sun dawns dimly and the sky is overcast for much of the morning. The gelding comes up a little lame at around midday, so Jaskier dismounts and checks him over as thoroughly as he can.

He can _see_ Kaer Morhen, enormous and black and broken, and he keeps it in the corner of his eye as much as he can, afraid that, if he looks away, it’ll be gone when he looks back. He’s _so close_ and he doesn’t trust the Fae as far as he can throw them, and he’s paranoid of this all being some trick on their part, that he’ll suddenly wake up and be back in Lettenhove, in his own padded wing of the manor, raving mad.

He can’t find anything wrong with the gelding per se, but he stands it in a stream anyway, letting the chill of the water cool any heat in its legs or sooth and small nicks it might have acquired. He notes idly his own boots filling with frigid water, soaking the bottom of his breeches and thoroughly chilling his feet, so that he’s hobbling when he steps out of the stream. He hitches the gelding to a tree before pulling off his own boots and emptying them onto the mud.

It’s then that he notices the quiet.

The rushing stream and his own tumultuous thoughts had hidden the retreat of all other noise, and by now Jaskier is a master at listening for the unnatural silence of a forest. All he can hear is the water. Even the gelding, usually mellow and unreactive, stands with its head high in the air, ears pricked, muscles tensed.

Jaskier pulls his boot back on, and catalogues. He hasn’t unpacked anything for his midday meal yet: everything is still in his saddlebags, tossed inelegantly to the ground next to his saddle and horse blanket, and the gelding is still wearing its bridle. Silently and urgently he begins the process of tacking back up when he hears a _snap_ and twists around, heart in his mouth, scanning the forest.

Fuck. _Fuck._ He’s _so fucking close._

There’s a flicker of movement, and all Jaskier can do is freeze, as he meets the gaze of a pair of amber eyes, oddly familiar yet still strangely different.

There’s no spark of recognition in them, but Jaskier knows what he’s looking at. Those are _witcher_ eyes.

“Witcher?” he calls out, voice quiet and unsteady, and all he hears is the wind.

Then he hears a low growl. It’s terrible and menacing and Jaskier’s lips quirk, because it sounds like something Geralt would do.

He steps forward, leaving his gelding behind, towards those eyes. They retreat, and then vanish, and Jaskier pays it no mind, following where they had been, and once he’s passed the first copse of trees and is standing where he thinks those eyes had been, he realises what he’s seeing.

It’s another Faerie Ring.

The grass here is _blue,_ truly blue; bluer than it is in Geralt’s Ring, and the mushrooms on the circumference are huge and an ugly brown and Jaskier wonders idly what one would feel like, crushing under his feet.

The witcher flickers back into view on the edge of the Ring. Jaskier has never seen Geralt do it before, and it makes his eyes blur and a pain spring momentarily to his head when he sees it; one moment the space is empty, and the next there’s a witcher standing there, and Jaskier doesn’t see it arrive. It’s just _there_.

The witcher growls at him again, baring longer yet thinner fangs than Geralt sports. He has feral eyes, darker than Geralt’s, and behind them Jaskier sees a despair that’s so all-consuming he feels his own throat close on a sob before the witcher’s expression shutters and he _roars._

It’s an impressive sound. Jaskier doesn’t even flinch.

“I know Geralt,” Jaskier tells him without preamble, once his ears have stopped ringing. The witcher stills. “Yeah. He, uh—he’s doing okay, stuck in his own Ring, like you. We—well, it’s a long story, but he’s sent me to Kaer Morhen. To find somebody who can help.”

The witcher snarls. “I’m not fucking helping you,” he hisses at Jaskier, his voice scratchy from disuse, and Jaskier puts his hands up in surrender. He wonders, briefly, how long it’s been since the witcher spoke to anybody, then closes that line of thought before he can follow it to the end.

“Alright. I’ll leave, and go up to the fortress. I just thought maybe you’d know something,” he says easily, taking a step back, as if to go. The witcher looks _mad._ He supposes that being trapped in a Ring like this for two years, cut off from your family, while still being able to _see_ your home—knowing that it’s _right there—_

Jaskier shudders. He turns to go, and then he hears a quiet, “wait.”

When he looks around, the witcher is watching him with the same strange intensity that Geralt usually wears. He looks… wilder, though. Less sane. _Hungrier._

“You—you’ve seen Geralt?” Jaskier nods. The witcher’s voice is _hoarse._ As though it had been yelling.

“He’s in Redania,” Jaskier tells him. “He’s doing okay.”

There’s a long silence, then, and Jaskier can see the witcher chewing on this information. He himself is used to long silences; after befriending Geralt, his tolerance for simply existing in the same space as another, not speaking, has strengthened greatly.

The witcher towers over Jaskier in a way that Geralt never did. He doesn’t think there’s actually a height difference—he just realises now that Geralt only ever tried it a handful of times in order to seem frightening, while this witcher is doing everything he can to intimidate him. There are no curving horns, no writhing tail. His porcelain skin seems ashen, somehow. He has his head lowered and a seething glare, his shoulders hitched, and the beginnings of a growl rumbling in his chest.

Jaskier stares back at him unabashedly, trying to communicate that _you can’t intimidate me._

It seems to work, because after a moment, the witcher says, “Lambert.”

Jaskier knows that name.

That’s—that’s one of Geralt’s brothers.

He focuses on the witcher, and realises, _this is one of Geralt’s brothers._

“Lambert,” he says out loud, testing the name on his tongue, his voice clear and steady and the witcher—and _Lambert_ closes his eyes, every line of his body relaxing involuntarily at the sound of it. It might be the first time he’s heard it in more than two years. This might be the first time he’s spoken to _anybody_ in more than two years.

In Geralt’s words, Lambert is: “a prickly bastard, hates what he is, hates the world for hating what he is—but he’s my brother.”

Jaskier doesn’t think he could ever look Geralt in the face again if he just _leaves_ Lambert here without at least having a conversation, without doing _something_ to help.

“I can stay, for a few hours,” Jaskier says out loud, testing the words in his mouth and finding them to be true. He doesn’t need to get to Kaer Morhen right away—he can spare some time here. He’s talking more to himself than to the broken witcher, yet upon hearing him Lambert’s eyes fly open and his face twists into a sneer.

“You _should_ ,” he snarls, the rage between his teeth mangling the last word so horribly that Jaskier nearly jerks to offer Lambert some water, though he doesn’t think it would go across very well. “You should go,” Lambert tries again, this time clearly, and Jaskier cocks his head.

“Do you know,” he begins slowly, considering each word carefully, “that Geralt told me that same exact thing, when I first met him. Of course, I didn’t _know_ he was a witcher—I only actually learnt that recently—I thought he was just a Faerie who didn’t have an appetite for humans, or something.” Jaskier breaks off to chuckle at the expression of utter incredulity that flits across Lambert’s face.

“I know! Believe me, he’s already told me off for that one. But, uh—yeah. He basically told me to fuck off, and I didn’t listen to him ‘cos—well. Because he looked like he could use a friend.” He considers Lambert, considers the way he’s still standing there _listening_ to him, because the man is so starved for attention and interaction that he’s willing to endure listening to Jaskier’s rambling.

“I have a few hours,” Jaskier repeats, soft. “I can sit with you and we can talk. Or I can just bring you some food and we can eat. But… you don’t have to be alone.”

 _“Pity,_ ” Lambert spits. “I won’t have it. _Leave.”_

“I will, if you really want me to,” Jaskier replies calmly, maintaining a perfectly inscrutable expression. Geralt had mentioned that Lambert was an asshole, in the fond way somebody remembers someone who is actually a lot worse in reality, but they haven’t seen them in a while. In fairness, Lambert has been trapped alone for two whole years—it’s enough to drive anybody a little bit inane. “But I don’t think you want me to. I’m not pitying you—and I think you’d regret it pretty quickly if you did send me away.”

Lambert glares at him, and stays silent.

“I could just tell you how your brother’s doing?” Jaskier tries.

Oh, Lambert’s scowl could boil entire oceans. “You told me he was well,” the witcher argues, his tone sharp enough to shear metal. “Leave me—go up to that fucking fortress, and don’t come back.”

He’s so _bitter._ He’s been stewing in his bitterness, in this tiny cage, for years.

Bitterness apparently twists a mind.

Jaskier hesitates, unwilling to give up quite this easily (unwilling to have to look Geralt in the face and tell him that he _abandoned_ his brother), before he makes up his mind and grins internally. Externally, he shrugs, then turns and pushes through the thicket of trees and return to his gelding.

The horse nickers to him quietly, and Jaskier takes a moment to scrub a hand down its face and murmur low reassurances in its ears, before he lets it put its head back down to graze. Jaskier turns and rifles through his saddlebags, pulling out meat and fruit and cheese and a bottle of mead that had been slipped in there by one of the strangers he’d stayed with on the other side of the mountains.

Lambert looks up and instantly coils into a bristling ball of hostility the moment he sees Jaskier step back into the clearing, food in hand.

“You fucking—”

“Yeah, well, I never listen. Also I kind of need you to tell me about this Trail thing so I don’t accidentally die on the way up to Kaer Morhen.” As a bribe, Jaskier tilts the bottle of mead toward Lambert, forcing his expression to remain impassive when Lambert eyes it with considerably more interest than he’d eyed Jaskier. He considers telling the prickly witcher that his frown will remain there if he isn’t careful, but he doesn’t think they’re on a level to banter quite just yet, and he doesn’t want to undo the tiny amount of progress he’s just won.

When no answer is instantly forthcoming, Jaskier shrugs, boldly walking forward to step over the boundary of the Ring, squashing down the urge to kick one of the huge mushroom caps, just to see what happens. He plops himself ungracefully down on the awful blue grass.

After setting the food down, arrayed so that the witcher can lean forward and take what he likes, Jaskier plucks a blade of the grass, holding it up to his face so as to inspect the unnatural colour. He rubs it between his fingers. He’d half expected the colour to come away onto his fingers, and is a little disappointed when no such thing happens.

He studiously doesn’t react when Lambert settles himself warily down beside him, only pushing over the bottle of mead and a cold piece of venison (hunted and roasted by yours truly), an only-slightly-bruised apple, and a generous chunk of his cheese. “It’s not exactly fine dining,” he says only a little apologetically, “but it’s not like money means anything anymore, and I can’t exactly just turn up at the nearest town to barter for food.”

There are lots of things that Lambert could say here, and Jaskier already knows them all, and knows that he won’t say them.

 _Thank you,_ he could say, but he’s too proud for that. _I haven’t eaten in two years,_ he could say, but Jaskier knows that Lambert knows that he already knows that, and so he won’t say it. _You shouldn’t be sharing your food, when there’s so little opportunity to get more of it,_ he could say, but Lambert is too selfish for that and besides, Jaskier can be horribly insistent when he wants to be. _You’re an odd human,_ he could say, except that that goes without saying.

Instead Lambert says nothing. He cracks the bottle open with his teeth and takes a long swig, closing his eyes. He doesn’t swallow right away—just holds the liquid in his mouth, and Jaskier has to look away from the stark emotion writ plainly on his face.

They eat quietly. Technically, this is Jaskier breaking his fast, and he chews and swallows methodically, not relishing the same food he’s been eating for days, now. Lambert chews each swallow until it must be mush in his mouth, grunting occasionally and periodically licking his fingers painstakingly clean, savouring every last bit of flavour.

It isn’t until Lambert has finished the venison and cheese, and is halfway through the apple, when he starts talking.

He tells Jaskier about the Killer, all the obstacles he can think of that Jaskier will have to go out of his way to avoid. He describes all the ones that, after two years of zero upkeep, will be too dangerous for him to even go near, and marks in the dirt all the ways that he can get around them without dying horribly. He talks him through scrambling up and over the barriers that are as much a part of the mountain as they are a staple of the Killer, shows him with rudimentary drawings in the dirt how they get the pack animals over them, tells him a story of how one year they’d had to hobble and drug the horses and pull them up manually, because a tree had come down and kept going down and accumulated a blockage of about four different exercises on the killer, comprised of shattered wood and rent metal.

Then he pauses.

“The solstices,” he begins, his voice hoarse from all the talking he’s done. “It—the solstices meant I could get _out_ ,” he says harshly, and Jaskier had quietly wondered about this. About what had happened.

“I tried to go up there. I pounded on the doors.” He stops, and breathes, and the next words are said with such bitterness, such hatred, that Jaskier doesn’t see how the witcher can ever forgive it. “Nobody answered. Fucking—months and fucking _years_ , and nobody fucking bothered to answer.” He falls silent.

Jaskier is horrified.

He feels _sick._

He doesn’t understand—he doesn’t understand why nobody in Kaer Morhen went to him. There _has_ to be a reason. His mind spins as he tries to think out all of the implications.

The witchers aren’t just schools—there are so few of them left, and there will never be any more of them, and the rest of the world _hates_ them. Fears them. The witchers are family—the wolves, at least, Jaskier knows; they consider themselves brothers. A pack. They’re family.

Geralt talks about his brothers with such obvious affection that it makes Jaskier’s heart hurt to know that they were separated. Geralt tells stories of his brothers accomplishments with such _pride,_ and then turns a sly eye on Jaskier and tells him that they can never know how he speaks of them—it would go straight to their heads, he’d never live it down—

They’re _family._ And Lambert…

Lambert picks up his bottle and tips back the last of his mead. Jaskier watches his throat bob around the swallow, still trying to think of something to say that could ever be good enough.

Lambert eyes him like he knows what he’s thinking about. “Go,” he says, before Jaskier can straighten his thoughts out.

He wants to reach out—he wants to put his hand on Lambert’s arm, and offer what comfort he can to this slowly breaking witcher. He thinks if he did then he’d lose his hand. There isn’t anything he can say. There’s nothing he can do that would be accepted.

So Jaskier folds, like a _coward._ “Goodbye, Lambert,” he manages to say, quietly, like his heart isn’t breaking in his chest for this _stranger_ he’s spent all of a few hours with, and he tries to make as little sound as possible when he leaves.

* * *

The road up to Kaer Morhen is as deadly as Lambert warned him it would be. At some points, the only way he can make out the path are the enormous cairns, built usually around a quarter-mile away from one another up the mountain, the ground between them no different to the rest of the mountainside, and just as impassable.

The gelding navigates the path with a deftness that Jaskier himself could never manage. Jaskier clings to the saddle and winds his hands in the horse’s mane and tries desperately not to think about all the times he’s nearly died, all the ways he could _still_ die. Every time the gelding slips beneath him, or its hoof strikes a rock and sends it scrambling for balance, Jaskier offers up a prayer to gods he no longer believes in.

Kaer Morhen grows taller and uglier and _eviller_ the closer that he gets. The old fortress looks as though it has grown out of the mountain itself, built from the same dark stone and just as weathered. High, arching windows dotted haphazardly across the castle give it the impression of a pock-marked visage, or else an ancient, unfathomable creature with dozens of ghastly eyes, supercilious, appalling.

In some parts, Jaskier can’t determine how the upper levels are still suspended, with the walls beneath them so crumbled and rotten that any support they give is more a memory than a reality. How _anybody_ can still be inside, residing there, Jaskier has no idea. He examines each black opening with a critical eye, searching for signs of light, of life, and finds nothing.

Doubt is an acrid flavour on his tongue. He does his best to ignore it, but as he scans what he can see of the fortress, and as Lambert’s words ( _nobody answered)_ echo in his mind, he can’t help but wonder if Geralt was perhaps wrong. If the fortress truly is abandoned, and the witchers lost.

Jaskier makes the climb in a little less than two days, camping precariously on a flat-yet-protruding rock jammed haphazardly in the side of the mountain, his horse tethered loosely to the ground. There’s nowhere for it to run, after all.

He feels odd, building a fire right there on the mountainside, exposed to anybody below who cares to look, but he supposes that the chances of him dying due to something spotting him and coming for him are relatively slim, yet the chances of him dying of hyperthermia in the chilly night air, made more frozen by the altitude, are one-hundred percent. Even so, he keeps the fire going only long enough to put some hot food and tea into his belly, and he extinguishes it before night properly falls, wrapped in every blanket and item of clothing he can manage and sheltered from the elements by his canvas tent.

He awakes the next morning cold but alive, not hunted down in the night, and he tacks up his chilled horse with frozen fingers and stumbles out into the frigid morning air.

* * *

The courtyard outside the keep is old and rotting and Jaskier dismounts before they venture too far inside, leaving the horse by the gate. The stones beneath his feet are cracked and the very walls seem to be _leering_ at him. (Jaskier knows he’s being paranoid; he hasn’t stay alive this long due to sheer _luck_ , he’ll have you know.) The last day was hair-raising enough that Jaskier is glad to be cautious now, treading carefully across the cracked and crumbling floor, testing his weight carefully before committing to each step.

Night is falling, the sky split into a thousand colours, and Jaskier pays them no mind. A sunset is nothing new. _This could be a trap_ , an oft-ignored voice in his mind urges him, and Jaskier ignores it again for the sake of scanning the fortress from close range.

It _might_ be a trap—he acknowledges that. He just also understands that if this is a trap, there isn’t very much he can do about it; he _has_ to do this, there isn’t any choice in that regard.

Witchers can see in the dark. (So can the Fae, that tiny voice reminds him.) They might just be waiting until they’re sure they have the advantage, before revealing themselves.

He reaches the doors—heavy oak, and _enormous._ Jaskier doubts he could shift them. They look to be the sort that are opened with a pulley, meant for grand entrances by kings to the aid of showcasing how wealthy they are, _I can afford teams of servants to open and close these ridiculously heavy doors whenever I’m feeling dramatic_. The witchers seem to use them as ordinary doors.

He bangs his fists against them, calling for the witchers of Kaer Morhen. When there is no answer, he steps away from them to crane his head back, eyeing the dilapidation and otherwise-obvious desertion, and tries not to give up hope.

Perhaps this is a test—perhaps they’re trying to wait him out. Ascertaining how serious he is about the endeavour. Waiting to see how long it will take him to give up and leave.

He can’t give up and leave—there’s nowhere for him to leave _to._

He starts a fire, in one corner of the courtyard, the cracked stone perfect for cradling the wood as he nurses it into a blaze. He roasts venison over the flames, and eats the last of the berries he’d picked at the base of the mountain. Mentally he calculates how long he can stay before he has to go and forage again, before the meat spoils and he’ll be forced to go and hunt a deer or a brace of rabbits or else fish.

The gelding dozes by his side, one hind leg cocked and resting, its lower lip hanging irreverently while it gently snorts in its sleep. There is no food up here for it, either—the grass that Jaskier has seen is poor, and will do little more than stuff its belly, rather than actually give it what it needs. Jaskier will need to find some other forage for it, or else leave the day after next, at the latest.

Having come to that uneasy conclusion, he clears a patch of ground from rubble, then lays his bedroll out, grimacing at its ragged appearance and praying he hasn’t missed any rocks to mercilessly dig into his spine during the night.

The tent comes out and is pitched precariously, the stakes stuck into the cracks of the rock, the canvas an uncomfortably thin barrier between himself and whatever horrors Kaer Morhen may hold. He falls into an uneasy sleep with the fire still burning.

* * *

He awakes, distressingly, to a blade at his throat.


	12. Chapter 12

There are few things that Jaskier would less like to wake up to than a witcher perched over him, brandishing a knife and a demented grin.

The blade is sharp enough to cut a burning line where it rests against his skin. Jaskier swallows nervously and feels the metal dig a shallow line, white-hot, and he freezes in place. The witcher leers.

After half a heartbeat of bemused terror, he abruptly recalls where he is; why he’s lying on the ground, his tent torn from over his head, a grey sky above him and the unyielding rock of the mountainside at his back.

The witcher leaning over him could be Geralt’s twin. “Eskel,” he breathes, returning the witcher’s scrutinising look with one of his own. Gold eyes (like Geralt’s, perhaps a little darker, and lighter than Lambert’s) bore into his own and Jaskier feels his heart skip a beat because _this is it, he’s here._

Kaer Morhen. _Finally._

The witcher—Eskel—stares at him, then hisses with furious bewilderment at his name falling from the lips of somebody who by all rights should not know it. In the back of his mind, Jaskier absently notes the similarities between this witcher and _his_ witcher. Their colouring isn’t the same, and Geralt hadn’t done justice in his descriptions to the disfiguring scars that mar Eskel’s lovely face, but from everything that he’s seen—yes, Jaskier thinks that they could be twins.

 _Brothers,_ Geralt had said. Jaskier can see it.

“Eskel,” he says louder, catching the witcher’s attention and his grimace. Eskel’s face twists, conflicting emotions tugging his features contradictorily, before he gives up on trying to grimace and scowl and give a questioning look and instead settles on hissing again. It would be more impressive if he’d been cursed to look like a Fae, as Geralt and Lambert had, but some base instinct buried deep in Jaskier’s gut still revolts.

“Hey, now,” he tries, “there’s no need—”

He’s cut off by a low growl that erupts from Eskel’s chest, menacing and rich and reverberating in Jaskier’s own chest.

“Witcher,” he tries. “You’re—Eskel, of the Wolf School. You’re a witcher.”

That gets him to sit back and cock his head. “Am I, now?” he asks, voice rasping and eyes full of malice. Jaskier nods with what little room he has, that knife still pressed against his neck.

“Geralt sent me here,” he says. “To—to help.”

“And why would we need _help?_ ” Eskel sneers, still not confirming (nor denying) a thing.

“With the Fae,” Jaskier continues, hope beginning to bloom. “And Vilgefortz.”

 _That_ gets Eskel to bring the blade away from Jaskier’s neck entirely, holding it at his side while he looks up to somebody stood behind Jaskier, a question in his eyes. There’s a moment where he silently communicates with whomever it is, and then he looks back down at Jaskier, obviously conflicted.

“Vesemir, he knows my _name._ He knows Geralt’s.” Eskel’s voice is pleading and also a little indignant.

“And now he knows mine,” the other voice—Vesemir—points out, and Jaskier smothers a smirk, figuring that at this point it’s a point of friction that he can’t afford.

“I know your name, training master,” Jaskier says, not bothering to raise his voice. “Geralt told me of you.”

“All good things, I’m sure,” Vesemir says, sounding amused. Jaskier winces.

“Uh, not—not really.”

Eskel smirks at that. “No? What did he tell you, then.”

Jaskier pauses, and takes a moment to collate his thoughts, to decide what will get these witchers to trust him. “He names all of his horses Roach,” he says after a moment, and can’t help the small spark of glee that erupts at Eskel’s startled expression. “After Vernon Roche. And—um—he calls you _brother._ You trained together. You’ve known each other for a century.” He pauses, weighing his words, and then says, “he also told me that when the two of you were fifteen, you stole a bottle of Mahakaman meand and got drunk enough to brea—”

A hand is shoved over Jaskier’s mouth before he can finish, Eskel’s expression going from disbelieving to alarmed with every word Jaskier says, and behind them, Vesemir growls.

“Of _course_ that was you two—”

“Do you know,” Eskel says conversationally to him, his voice strained, “I’ve gotten away with that for a _hundred fucking years._ ”

Jaskier just shrugs at him.

Behind him, Vesemir is still spitting curses, and Eskel fixes Jaskier with a quelling look before drawing his hand away.

“Also,” Jaskier immediately adds, to Eskel’s apparent consternation, “he told me about the time in Novigrad, with the twins—”

Eskel replaces his hand and closes his eyes with something rather akin to distress crossing his features. “Alright,” he says after a moment, “message received—I believe you, because I can smell that you’re not lying and also _only Geralt and I_ know about that, so. I just have one question for you.” He opens his eyes and stares down at Jaskier again, who can only lift his brows in question. “How did you not annoy Geralt into killing you?”

He removes his hand, and Jaskier takes a moment to think about his answer. “I kept bringing him good wine,” he finally says. “Also he was kind of trapped behind a Faerie Ring until about a month ago, so I’ve known him for about a year, which is why he didn’t just kill me after about five minutes of speaking to me.” That’s the abbreviated version, but it’s not _wrong_ , per se.

Eskel peers down at him, a calculating look casting shadows across those golden eyes, before he relents and stands gracefully, sheathing the dagger. He pauses, eyeing Jaskier distrustfully, and then holds a hand out in clear invitation.

Jaskier accepts it with only a little trepidation, and, when standing, turns to appraise Vesemir with just as much scrutiny as the old witcher is directing at him. Silence persists for several long heartbeats, before Vesemir leans back, apparently satisfied.

“You said Geralt sent you? To help with the Fae” he asks.

Jaskier hesitates, and then nods. “He said that—that me being human, would mean something.”

Vesemir and Eskel share another _look_ , and Jaskier takes a moment to briefly wonder why Geralt and Lambert were apparently cursed with Fae visages, while these two escaped that fate. He remembers Geralt mentioning it was a—a punishment, or a game, and that the Fae had done it to prevent him from being helped; did they deem that these two weren’t in need of such tricks? Or is Kaer Morhen somehow impervious to Fae attacks?

So many questions, but he’s prevented from voicing any of them by a violent shiver that wracks his frame.

It doesn’t go unnoticed.

“We should go inside,” Eskel suggests, eyeing Jaskier’s clenched jaw and balled fists, trying to cheep his chattering teeth and shaking hands under wraps. “There’s no point standing around in this cold when we could be inside and warm.”

“Let us go, then,” Vesemir intones, and turns to lead them into the keep.

* * *

The keep is more than just dilapidated—the keep is _falling apart._

Twice, the stone crunches under Jaskier’s foot, and he looks down to find cracks spiderwebbing away from where he’d stepped, the tile looking ready to crumble into dust. The walls creak in the wind, despite being built from thick stone, and some parts of the castle are completely impassable for a human.

Jaskier regards the crumbling state of the halls of Kaer Morhen with abject horror as they cross through the keep; Eskel and Vesemir either don’t notice, or don’t care.

The room that they end up in was perhaps once a kitchen; now, the walls have been mended with what looks to be packed mud and reinforced with timber; there is a log burner in one corner, its pipe leading upwards and then meeting awkwardly with the wall that Jaskier assumes must lead to the outside, and while it isn’t lit currently there is evidence of past fires nestled inside, white ash and black smoke staining the insides.

Along one side are a jumble of tables and sideboards nailed haphazardly to the wall with chests and crates stuffed beneath them. The organised chaos of an oft-used kitchen spreads atop them; buckets of cutlery and stacks of dishes and other utensils; crumbs litter the counter; there is a tin with a cloth spread atop it that looks to be for making bread. A basket of bruised fruit sits lonely in one corner, and racks of drying herbs and two game birds hung from hooks line the walls.

In the corner of the room sits a table, around which are three mismatched chairs and atop of which are scattered gwent cards. Jaskier can’t see which ones there are from here, but he suddenly wishes that he had packed his own.

In the final corner of the room are two cots, covered in furs and sagging slightly. Beside one of them lays a haphazard pile of gleaming armour; beside the other, a stack of books, well-thumbed and obviously looked-after.

“Ale?” Eskel offers, striding to one of the chests and pulling it out from under the counter. The floor is worn with track marks from where he’s done this many times before. He throws it open, and inside Jaskier sees rows and rows of dusty bottles.

“Alright,” he accepts, and casts another glance around the room. This enormous keep…

Vesemir catches his gaze, and his expression darkens.

“This fucking keep’s falling down around our ears,” he scowls. “Fae magic. Bastards. It was built to keep everything out, but that doesn’t stop them _trying._ Wards can only do so much.” He pauses to accept a bottle of… something, from Eskel, and cracks the lid off with his teeth before continuing. “I remember when this place was built. I remember when—when this place was full. Now look at it.”

He seems more bitter than truly upset, and when Jaskier cautiously asks, he spits, and says, “I’m three hundred years old, boy. The humans made monsters to fight monsters, and then decided we were too monstrous. But there’s no point in staying stuck in the past.”

It’s a sensible way of thinking, but Jaskier isn’t sure how much the old witcher really believes it; he doesn’t contradict him, however.

“So you’ve moved everything into one room, then?” he asks, eyeing the cots and the gwent stack and the domesticity of it all.

Eskel snorts. “Yeah. Safer this way. Vesemir still slinks off to the library and I sure as shit don’t spend all my time in here, but—no point trying to keep the rest of the keep upright, when stones are turning to dust right in front of us.”

Jaskier shudders. _What a terrible way of living._

There’s silence for a few moments, and then Jaskier suddenly thinks of something. “What did you do with my horse?”

“Stabled him,” Eskel answers. “He’s fine—he’s got grain and hay and there’s a roof over his head and straw on the floor, and a bucket of water. Scorpion’s trying to bully him, but your gelding doesn’t give enough of a shit to be bothered about it.”

Jaskier blinks, trying to make the words _Scorpion’s trying to bully him_ make some sort of sense in his head, before ultimately putting that to the side and instead focusing on the news of his horse.

“Well, alright then,” he eventually says, because nothing else is immediately springing to mind.

Vesemir snorts again. It’s an ugly, harsh sound, and Jaskier finds himself wondering absently whether he’s coarse on purpose, or if he’s just gotten so used to not having people around that he doesn’t even notice anymore.

“Come on then, lad, sit down and let us explain some things,” the old witcher tells him, and Jaskier eyes him suspiciously before complying.

* * *

“I know all of this,” Jaskier says, when they’re done. “Granted, you’re better storytellers than _Geralt_ —”

“High praise,” Eskel murmurs, and Jaskier grins, though doesn’t acknowledge him in any other way.

“—but… I already know how it all happened.”

“Do you know _where_ it happened?” Vesemir asks him.

“Aretuza? Right?”

Vesemir nods, but he’s looking at Jaskier like there’s something Jaskier hasn’t understood. “Right. _Aretuza._ Tor Lara—the Tower of the Gull. The most concentrated source of magic on the Continent. And there’s a Fae portal built by a Faerie Queen inside of it.” Vesemir shakes his head with dismay, and continues. “The mages have been warding and protecting Thanedd Island for as long as there have been mages there. And every single ward and trap and pitfall has been thrown into effect; there are places on that island that a mage cannot go.” He looks up and pierces Jaskier with the intensity of his gaze. “That’s where _you_ come in.”

Jaskier’s throat dries, and he stares back at Vesemir, uncomprehending. “I—what? You need me to— _what?”_

Vesemir smiles grimly. “You’ll go there with a mage, and you’ll use your utterly nonmagical heritage to reach Aretuza. You’ve no elves in your bloodline? No dwarves? Nobody magical of any sort?”

Jaskier is a little taken aback, and answers, “no!” rather shortly before his mind catches up to the rest of the question. Realisation dawns, and he hotly demands, “and just _how_ am I supposed to do all of that?”

Eskel steps in, saying, “easy, Jaskier—somebody will go with you. They’ll explain everything. It’ll be dangerous, but—” he breaks off, and Jaskier finishes his sentence for him.

“But I’m here,” he says quietly. “This is what I signed up for. I just— _magic.”_

“Yeah,” Eskel says quietly.

The ale in Jaskier’s hand has long warmed, but he tips the rest of it into his mouth anyway, grimacing slightly at the flavour change and swallowing it quickly.

“Who’s going with me?” Jaskier asks, thinking through all of the mages Geralt has mentioned to him and wondering which he’d prefer.

“Oh,” Eskel says, sounding faintly surprised. “I thought you knew. It’s—well, it’s Ciri.”

Jaskier stares blankly at him. “Okay? I don’t know who that is.”

He earns twin looks of bewilderment. “You—what do you mean, you _don’t know._ ” Jaskier holds his hands up, hoping it’ll appease Eskel.

“I—am I supposed to?”

Eskel and Vesemir share a look. Jaskier can parse this one easily: _what the fuck?_

Finally, Vesemir turns back to Jaskier and says, “Princess Cirilla? Of Cintra?”

Jaskier frowns—he’s heard that name before. He’d thought she was _young._ Like, ten. “Didn’t she die?” he frowns.

“Oh, hell,” Eskel sighs. “Didn’t he—did Geralt not _tell you?_ ” He sounds genuinely perplexed. “The Lion Cub of Cintra. She’s—sixteen now? Geralt’s Child of surprise. Daughter of Emhyr var Emreis and Pavetta of Cintra?”

Jaskier stares. “ _What?”_

* * *

After another bottle of ale and half an hour of exhaustive explanations, sitting around the gwent-covered table and picking at a hunk of bread spread sparingly with salted butter, Jaskier pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head, as though to clear away the confusion.

“So—Geralt saves—”

“Duny, yes.”

Jaskier scowls up at Eskel. “Geralt saves _Duny_ , who was Emhyr but… cursed, and then claims Law of Surprise—”

“Because he’s an idiot who learns nothing,” Eskel interjects.

“—right, yes,” Jaskier agrees. “He claims Law of Surprise, which turns out to be a _child,_ and he ignores it—”

“Didn’t work out,” Eskel mutters again, and this time Jaskier doesn’t acknowledge him but with a glare.

“—until Cintra is invaded by Niflheim, a few years ago, because of politics; so the princess escapes, everybody assumes her dead, but really she’s found by Geralt? And is brought here to be trained.”

Laid out like that, it’s convoluted enough to be a mediocre play written by an exhausted and burnt-out student of the Arts at Oxenfurt, hoping to just scrape a passing grade so they can crawl into bed and sleep.

“Pretty much,” Eskel agrees.

“What the fuck.”

“Believe me,” Vesemir says, speaking up for the first time in ten minutes, “this is just the latest thing in a long line of bullshit that Geralt gets up to.”

Jaskier’s lips quirk into a smile. “Yeah, he told me some of it,” he says, remembering. “I thought witchers had a ‘don’t get involved’ policy?”

Eskel sits back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table. “We do. But Geralt has never paid much attention to it.”

“But he _says_ that he does,” Jaskier adds, to the twin pained grimaces of Vesemir and Eskel.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Jaskier repeats, because it bears repeating.

“Try knowing him for a hundred years,” Eskel says sagely.

“Try knowing him as a _teenager_ ,” Vesemir adds, his voice strained. He shoots Eskel a look just as the other witcher opens his mouth, and Eskel wisely closes it again.

“Why is Princess Cirilla with… Yennefer now, then?” Jaskier asks, pausing to remember which sorceress the princess is supposed to be staying with. Jaskier has heard some things about Yennefer, but not very much.

“Well, Ciri—she’s also an insanely powerful sorceress, or something,” Eskel says easily. “Or at least she will be. While she was here, she kept having these… uh, episodes—and we’re _witchers._ Women can’t be witchers. We didn’t know what to do with this eight year old kid having visions, or whatever. We trained her body, trained her to fight like one of us, and Triss came along to have a look at her before we brought Yennefer in to help”

The name _Triss_ snags something in Jaskier’s memory, and he sets the thought aside, for now. “Why did Geralt not tell me all of this?”

Vesemir sits back in his chair, his jaw working while he obviously thinks something over. “He might have been afraid of being watched,” he says finally. “He’d protect that girl to his dying breath—and if he believes that the Faeries don’t know about her, he’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.”

Jaskier traces a spill of ale on the table before him with his finger, idly watching the way it soaks into the plethora of other stains that mark the wood. “What would happen if the Fae _did_ know about her?”

It’s Eskel who answers this time. “Well—the reason you managed to cross the entirety of Redania and Kaedwen without being hassled—” ( _too much_ , Jaskier thinks darkly, remembering those insane days on the mountains, but he elects not to mention them) “—is that the Faeries don’t care particularly for non-magic people anymore. Sure, to them you’re dinner, but a witcher or a mage or an elf—it’s open season on us because we’re the only ones who could potentially _fight back.”_

“And Ciri’s a Source,” Vesemir adds, as though that means anything. Catching Jaskier’s expression, he explains. “Means—means her magic works differently, comes from a different place. She’s unstable, though her time with the witches has to have helped. Means she’s _dangerous._ ”

“And she’s a witcher’s Child Surprise,” Eskel says. “The Fae can probably smell that—”

“Alien bastards,” Vesemir mutters.”

“—so they’ll be after her more. If they hear tell of her, work out where she lives… yes, she’d be in danger.”

Jaskier pulls his hand away from the wet patch on the table, and deliberates for several long moments. “I think I need another drink,” he finally admits, his voice only a little despairing.

* * *

In the early afternoon, after a morning of drinking and showing Jaskier what they can of the keep, Vesemir goes to revisit some books in his library and Jaskier admits to wanting to check on his horse.

“What’s its name, by the way?” Eskel asks him, leading him through the keep.

Jaskier winces. “Uh—”

Eskel raises a sardonic brow at him and shakes his head disparagingly. “You haven’t even named him?”

“It’s… it’s complicated,” Jaskier says slowly, his mind racing as he tries to figure out how to explain why. Eventually, he sighs, and says, “I just—I had this idea that if I didn’t name him… he’d survive all of this?”

“Not getting attached,” Eskel muses. “But you’re _already_ attached.”

Jaskier shrugs. “I didn’t say it made any sense.”

Eskel eyes him, then tells him simply, “it’s pretty fucking stupid.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. Then he smirks, wondering how much he can banter with this witcher, and says, “though it’s not as stupid as—”

“By the _gods_ ,” Eskel curses under his breath, “I’m going to regret you and Geralt ever meeting, aren’t I?”

“I just want to know—”

“No,” Eskel interrupts, his tone broking no argument. “Look, we’re here. Say hello to your horse. _Name him._ ”

The stables are built of stone, and only perhaps half a dozen are occupied. Jaskier finds his white gelding stabled next to an enormous black stallion.

“That’s Scorpion,” Eskel says fondly, patting the stallion on the nose and receiving a grumpy nip for his trouble. “He’s mine.”

Jaskier only hums, hiding his grin at the knowing look Eskel sends him for his polite nonanswer, and unlatches the door to step into the stable beside his gelding. The horse greets him with a nudge that nearly knocks him over, and he shoves back, earning a mock-glare from the gelding as it lays its ears back and snaps its teeth.

“Hey, boy,” he murmurs quietly, suddenly aware of Eskel listening at the door. “Can’t believe you let these fools just lead you away in the night. Whatever happened to loyalty?”

“To be fair,” Eskel interjects, “we had carrots.”

“Carrots! Oh, that’s alright then,” Jaskier tells his horse. “You can’t just say no to a carrot. I completely understand.”

“He’s a fine horse,” Eskel compliments then, and Jaskier grins. “Good bone, good feet, good conformation. Where the hell did you get him?”

“Lettenhove breeds horses,” Jaskier explains. “Racehorses, hunters.” He ducks around the gelding, checking it over to make sure no harm has come to it in the stable, before he straightens. At his words, Eskel whistles appreciatively.

“Well, now you have to name him,” he says expectantly. Jaskier rolls his eyes.

He pets his hand down the horse’s neck, moving with it as it steps forward to snuffle at Eskel, when a sudden strike of inspiration hits him, watching the light coming into the barn dance of its rippling white flank. “Pegasus.”

There’s a beat, and then incredulously, Eskel repeats, “ _Pegasus?”_

Jaskier pats his horse—pats _Pegasus_ —on the shoulder. “That’s right. He’s white and fast and brave and clever, and loyal.”

Eskel stares. “Well,” he says after a moment, “I guess it’s not any dumber than Scorpion.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“It’s not as badass, though.”

Jaskier smirks. “You don’t think Pegasus would win against Scorpion in a fight?”

“Oh, I _know_ he wouldn’t—”

“Pegasus has faced down actual fucking Faeries, basically—”

“ _Basically?”_

“Yeah, as in, we ran from them and survived.”

“Scorpion would _fight_ them and win.”

“That’s a fucking lie—”

“Jaskier,” Eskel interrupts, slinging an arm companionably around his shoulders and flicking his tail against Jaskier’s leg, “I think you and I are gonna be _great_ friends.

Jaskier grins and knocks his shoulder against Eskel’s. “You’re only saying that ‘cause you don’t want to admit you’re wrong.”

* * *

It’s that evening, after Jaskier has followed Eskel all around the keep in the most hair-raising tour of his life—

(“That staircase does _not_ look stable,” Jaskier decides, staring up at the crumbling steps.

“Oh, it isn’t,” Eskel answers easily. “You’ve gotta jump up.”

“Well, it’s a good job I’m the only human on the Continent with the ability to jump ten feet straight up, isn’t it,” Jaskier snarks, crossing his arms obstinately across his chest. “Is there _no_ other way to get up there?”

“Nope,” Eskel says, popping the ‘p’. “C’mon, I’ll carry you.”

“Like fuck you will—”

There’s a brief scuffle; Jaskier loses.

“Stop _wriggling_ —”

“Oh, shit—shit— _shit, shit, fucking put me down—”_

“There, see? That wasn’t too bad. This way, then.”)

\--and survived, miraculously, that Jaskier brings up Lambert.

Eskel sets his bowl of stew back on the table, and drops his eyes to the ground. Vesemir stops chewing momentarily to shoot Jaskier a surprised look, before hurriedly swallowing.

“Lambert’s—you’ve seen Lambert?”

“Yeah,” Jaskier answers the old witcher, a frown darkening his features. Do they not know? “He’s in a Faerie Ring pretty much at the bottom of the path up here. Said he tried visiting you on the solstices, but nobody ever answered.”

Vesemir looks—Vesemir looks about as stricken as Jaskier imagines he _can_ look, with a few hundred years of hiding his expressions under his belt and a face that naturally tends towards inscrutability.

Eskel, on the other hand, looks _horrified._ “He—what? No— _no,_ those were—that was a trick. That was a _trick._ The wards—he couldn’t—” he breaks off, trembling, and Jaskier doesn’t know what to say.

“Uh, yeah. He… wasn’t doing too well, when I spoke to him. I gave him lunch, talked to him about getting up here, talked to him about Geralt. He seemed… a bit fragile,” Jaskier says tactfully, watching the witchers carefully. Vesemir covers his face with one hand, the fingers trembling very slightly. Eskel barks out a sound that could have been a laugh, or a sob.

“You’re lying.”

They all know that he isn’t, and Jaskier doesn’t dignify that with a comment; he simply looks steadily at him, trying to radiate an aura of _I’m not going to judge you_.

Eskel scrubs a hand over his face, and says despairingly, “he’s—oh, _fuck,_ he’s totally lost it, hasn’t he.”

Jaskier deliberates lying, before remembering they’d smell it on him. “…Kind of,” he winces.

Without a word, Vesemir drops the remaining chunk of his bread on the table, stands, and leaves. Eskel watches him go like he’d very much like to follow him. Instead, he turns to Jaskier, and says, “tell me about him.”

So Jaskier does: he talks about how Lambert had looks, how there had been that veneer of insanity that had at first been difficult to look past, how he was prickly and rude and starved for attention. He sugarcoats it a little, and is immediately called out on it, so he tries his best not to be cruel, instead.

“He thinks we abandoned him,” Eskel says hoarsely, when Jaskier is done. “I can’t even imagine—two fucking _years,_ all alone, and he can fucking _see_ Kaer Morhen—he must not understand. He must think we’re _dead._ He must hope we’re dead, rather than imagining that we—that we—”

Jaskier reaches out and grabs Eskel’s hand in one of his own. “He’s your brother,” he reminds. “He might be a bastard, but he’s your _brother._ He’ll forgive you.”

Eskel chokes out a wet laugh. “You don’t know Lambert,” he reminds, “that man can hold a grudge like nothing else. He used to call Triss by her last name just ‘cause he knew it pissed her off.”

“I know. And then when she was sick, he helped her. He’s not _all_ bad,” Jaskier says gently, feeling like an imposter for reassuring a man he’s known for a day about his brother that he only met for a few hours.

“He only helped her because he felt guilty. Probably,” Eskel adds, sounding unsure. Jaskier squeezes his fingers.

“So he’s not a _complete_ asshole. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have done that.”

Eskel pauses, then withdraws his hand from Jaskier’s and uses it to scrub over his face. Jaskier politely doesn’t mention the slight redness to his eyes.

“I need to sleep,” the witcher says abruptly. “Or meditate. But… sleep. I’ll—I’ll show you to a room, get you some sheets,” he mutters, almost to himself, and abruptly stands from the table.

Jaskier follows him, shivering in the chill of the fortress, and tries to imagine it: two years, _completely_ alone, knowing that your family is within reach, and being unable to see them—and then learning that they don’t _want_ you.

He sleeps uneasily that night.

* * *

“I’ve contacted Yennefer,” Vesemir tells him the next morning, without preamble. There’s no evidence of the previous night’s discussion, nothing to suggest that the witcher is _burning_ inside with guilt. The furs on his cot, when Jaskier checks, are rumbled from sleep, and there’s a pot of coffee on the side and a breakfast of bread and eggs, and this mention of Yennefer.

“Okay?” Jaskier says around a mouthful of eggs. “She’s—she’s coming here?”

Vesemir hums. Yennefer. Of Vengerberg. The sorceress, an old flame of Geralt’s, and mother apparent to his _kid._ Suddenly Jaskier isn’t too enthused about his eggs.

“She’ll bring Ciri,” Vesemir tells him. “Portal to just outside the keep, where we’ve made enough adjustments to the spells that she can bull through the rest of the wards with sheer power, and she’ll talk to us—to _you_ , about Thanedd Island and Aretuza.”

“Right,” Jaskier says, looking down at his eggs. He’d assumed that the witchers would have some idea of where Yennefer was, and then he would travel to meet her, but—

Suddenly, all of this seems a lot more real.

“How long will she be?” he asks.

“Could be a few days. Could be a few weeks,” Vesemir shrugs, apparently unconcerned. “She’ll show up when she sees fit.”

“Alright,” he says after a moment. “So we’ve just got to wait.”

“Aye,” Vesemir agrees. “Don’t worry, lad. We’ll make sure you don’t get bored.

* * *

By the time Yennefer arrives, Jaskier is ready to leave Kaer Morhen to go and track her down his damn self.

He’s alone in Vesemir’s library, flipping through books that are older than his bloodline to determine where they should go in Vesemir’s new system of sorting, when he hears a… _disturbance_ from the courtyard outside. His first, immediate thought it, _oh thank fuck._

He leaves the book where it is and hurries through the corridors to the hole in the floor where he won’t break his ankles if he jumps down through it, rather than taking the extra twenty minutes to go and find the one working staircase on this side of the fortress.

(“Why don’t you fix all of this?” Jaskier asks Eskel one day. “It’s not like you don’t have the time.”

“We don’t need to,” Eskel answers with a shrug. “The Fae are bringing it down around our ears, faster than we can fix it. And it doesn’t bother either of us. Not like anybody’ll be using this place after us, anyway.”

Jaskier thinks of some things he can say about _preserving history_ and _improving your environment will improve your mental health_ and _so you’re just okay with living like this?_ But he never says any of it aloud. He thinks Eskel probably already knows what he wants to say anyway. Instead he just adapts.)

By the time he gets there, Vesemir is already arguing with perhaps one of the most beautiful women Jaskier has ever seen, and Eskel is laughing at both of them, covered in dust and horse shit and only the gods-know-what-else, a strange expression in his eyes. He perks up when he sees Jaskier.

“Yen—”

“ _Don’t_ call me that,” the sorceress hisses, her violet eyes flashing, and Jaskier gulps. Eskel talks over her like she hadn’t spoken.

“This is Jaskier,” he introduces.

Yennefer runs a martial eye over him, at once considering and then dismissing him, and looks back to Vesemir, clearly unimpressed. “You told me he was capable.”

“I told you he was _human_ ,” Vesemir corrects. “And he has to have some degree of skill, to have reached here, alone, through Fae territory and over the mountains.”

Yennefer sneers. “You expect me to send Cirilla on a fool’s mission with _him?_ ”

Faintly, Jaskier thinks he ought to be offended, but… he’s not. “You don’t even know me,” he points out, and Eskel glances at him with an unreadable expression… though he seems faintly approving.

“You think to help?” she demands, rounding on him with ire flashing in those purple eyes. “You think you have _any_ idea of what you’re going up against?”

It’s as she’s saying it to him, this unthinkably powerful sorceress, surrounded by these unthinkably powerful witchers, all of whom are at _least_ five times his age, that he realises how idiotic it sounds.

“I think you don’t have a lot of choice,” he says, squashing down the sudden feelings of inadequacy. “I think it’s going to be a long time before you find somebody better.” Jaskier wants to say more, but she already looks like she wants to skin him, and he decides not to push his look.

“I think you overestimate your importance,” Yennefer says finally, after letting the silence hold for several seconds. “And Cirilla isn’t ready yet.” She stops, and glances up at the keep, at its dilapidated state, the crumbling stone of the courtyard, the sound of the wind as it shrieks over the fortifications. “Let’s take this inside,” she suggests, and sweeps towards doors before anybody can contradict her.

Vesemir stalks after her with a scowl, but Eskel hangs back with an odd expression on his face to wait for Jaskier.

“How old is Ciri?” Jaskier asks, watching them go.

“Sixteen,” Eskel says after half a moment. “Or thereabouts. You think—”

“I think Yennefer’s afraid for her,” he confirms. “I think she doesn’t want to admit it. And I think we’ll all be stuck here until _she_ deems it okay.”

Eskel curses softly under his breath, quiet enough that Jaskier doesn’t catch it. “It’s—we’ll figure it out.”

Jaskier isn’t so sure.

* * *

Dinner that night is a tense affair.

Yennefer is categorically aloof throughout it all, perfectly mannered, perfectly silent. She reminds Jaskier of when he would be forced to attend banquets at his father’s table, and the Viscount’s friends would seat their wives at their sides and then ignore them for the evening. Beautiful, icy women, perfectly made up with the appropriate smiles fixed to their faces, who were certainly seated at the table but were never really _there._

He wonders, idly, what she’s thinking of. Where she is.

And then she catches his eye and her face freezes over, and he smiles faintly at her, suppressing the scowl that tries to twist his own features into something ugly.

It’s obvious that he and Yennefer are the only ones at the table with any sort of political acumen. Vesemir and Eskel both look deeply, deeply uncomfortable, talking far too loudly and trying to draw their silent companions into the conversation. Jaskier gives one- or two word answers, to be polite. Yennefer just raises a single, sculpted brow, and allows the questions to fall flat.

Jaskier clears his plate and stands to clean it, taking Vesemir’s and Eskel’s as well, and then after a moment of thought he takes Yennefer’s and balances it atop his stack. She doesn’t acknowledge him. He moves to the corner of the room to begin scrubbing at them, and behind him, Yennefer speaks for the first time that evening, engaging Vesemir in talk about the wards of the fortress.

Jaskier grits his teeth and pretends he isn’t intensely annoyed.

Surprisingly (or not _so_ surprisingly, Jaskier muses later, but at the time the shock of it is a bucket of frigid water to his system), it’s _Eskel_ who speaks up.

“Yennefer,” he warns, his voice a low rasp, and Jaskier shivers a little at the sound of it. He misses Geralt. “You can’t just ignore this.”

“Yes, I can,” she says breezily.

“No,” Vesemir growls. “Cirilla is as ready as she’ll ever be. She—”

“What would you know?” Yennefer asks, and her voice has become as soft as silk, and this, more than anything, speaks to something deep inside Jaskier that immediately lifts its head and screams, _run!_

“You gave her to me,” Yennefer continues, voice still deadly. “I have had her for years, now. She’s not a witcher. She can’t be a witcher. You haven’t even seen her—you have no idea whether she’s ready or not.” There’s something about the staunch lack of inflection in her voice that has Jaskier itching to reach for the knife laid out on the table, but he doesn’t think it would go very well.

Yennefer is like a mountain cat, sleek and deadly, commanding this table as she would a king’s court. Before her, Vesemir and Eskel band together like wolves, baring their teeth, but unsure where to go next.

Next to this supernaturally beautiful sorceress, draped in only the finest fabrics, fit for audience with a king, he feels unkempt and unclean and wretched. A fox, hidden in the bushes.

“Bring her here, and let us see, then,” Vesemir implores. “She’ll need to come here anyway, to brush up on her swordsmanship—”

“ _No_ ,” Yennefer hisses. “No. Not yet, at least.”

“Boring,” a new voice says, and a string of truly impressive curse words spill from both Vesemir and Eskel’s lips, in a plethora of languages. Yennefer leaps to her feet, fists cracking with magic.

Jaskier stays where he is. If whatever it is gets through the two witchers and the sorceress standing in front of him, he doesn’t stand a chance either way.

“ _Cirilla_ ,” Vesemir roars, his voice a crack of thunder, and Jaskier looks to see a—

A _teenager._

That’s a teenager.

There’s a teenager standing in the door to the kitchen, dressed in leathers and armed to the teeth, her arms crossed irritably across her chest. She has white hair and green eyes and an absolutely unrepentant expression on her Cintran features.

Oh, to be a teenager again.

She—Cirilla, Jaskier can only assume—raises a brow at Vesemir in such a perfect imitation of Yennefer that Jaskier wonders for a moment if she’s legitimately her daughter, before remembering that, first: sorceresses are sterile, and, second: she’s the daughter of _Emhry var Emreis_ and _Pavetta of Cintra._ Technically, Jaskier is in the presence of royalty.

“Such foul language, master witcher,” she says teasingly, and Jaskier grins despite himself. “And _Eskel._ I expected better from you!”

“Why?” the witcher asks, not missing a beat, and walks forward just as Cirilla bares her teeth in her own grin and jumps towards him, landing heavily against him. He bears her weight for a moment, hugging back, before dropping her unceremoniously to the ground and scruffing a hand through her wild hair. “I thought we cut this?” he asks her, tugging on a lock despite her yowling at him to stop.

“It grows fast,” she says, tugging the locks from his fingers, before reaching forward to twist her fingers through his hair and tug remorselessly on what she can snatch. Eskel lets her.

“ _Cirilla_ ,” Yennefer spits, shattering the moment. The princess pulls her hands back to set them on her hips, and turns to face the sorceress down.

“Yes, Lady Yennefer?” she asks innocently, and Jaskier bites his tongue to keep from laughing.

Yennefer continues glaring for a moment more, before her face softens and she sighs. “Why can you never just _listen?”_

“That would be boring,” Princess Cirilla, heir to the empire of Nilfgaard and the crown of Cintra, replies without a hint of shame. “Besides, I wanted to see what all the fuss was.” With this, she whirls to appraise Jaskier, who returns her keen gaze.

“You know,” he says after a moment, breaking the silence, “from everything Eskel and Vesemir have told me, I thought you’d be taller.”

There’s a pause, and then the princess barks out a laugh, and shoots him a feral grin. He grins back.

“You know my—you know Geralt?” she asks him then, and he nods, crossing his arms and leaning back against the counter behind him. “He didn’t tell you anything about me, did he?” her eyes are bright, but she sounds a little resigned.

“It took me months to get him to string enough words together to get even a sentence out of him,” Jaskier shrugs. “Talking isn’t exactly his strong suit. It took me two _years_ for him to even tell me he was a witcher.”

Cirilla scrunches her nose. “That sounds like Geralt. What did you think he was?”

It’s an innocent question, but Jaskier feels embarrassed when he admits, “I, uh—thought he was actually a Faerie.”

The matching looks they send his way are comical. He holds his hands up to defend himself. “Well, he _looks_ like one!”

“Jaskier,” Cirilla says slowly, as if she’s talking to an invalid. “That’s really stupid.”

“Well,” he begins, “I’m not dead yet.”

“Not for lack of trying, apparently,” Eskel interjects, sounding both awed and horrified. Jaskier just shrugs.

* * *

Jaskier and Cirilla instantly become fast friends, to the eternal dismay of everybody else.

(“Call me Ciri,” she instructs him, and he rolls the name around on his tongue for a moment to get used to it.

* * *

“So,” she says to him, “what do you think of Geralt?” He blushes, and she laughs.

* * *

“How many of the chickens do you think we could get into Eskel’s room before he notices?” she asks him.

He deliberates.

“Only one way to find out,” he answers, and she giggles.)

Four days after her arrival at Kaer Morhen; four days of private discussions between Yennefer and the witchers; four days of Jaskier and Ciri cementing their friendship, Ciri offhandedly mentions during a midday meal that she and Jaskier ought to be setting off soon.

She’s met with a barrage of quizzical looks. “Isn’t that what you’re all planning?” she asks them, “sending me and Jaskier off to fuck up Vilgefortz?”

“Language,” Eskel says, just as Jaskier says, “what the fuck?”

Yennefer doesn’t break eye contact with Ciri. Jaskier eyes them both while he eats; there is some _serious_ silent communication going on there, and for the life of him, Jaskier can’t figure out who’s winning.

Finally, Yennefer sighs, and Ciri sits back, looking smug. “I don’t know _how_ ,” she insists, even though that doesn’t make any sense. “It wasn’t a vision, not really. I just… know.”

“Vision?” Jaskier asks, but nobody clarifies, so he tucks that one away for later.

“Care to explain what that was, ladies?” Eskel asks, and Jaskier’s only a little miffed when they turn to him and immediately begin to do so.

“Jaskier _has_ to come with me,” Ciri insists. “I don’t know how I know, or really why, I just—do.”

“You’ve been wrong before,” Vesemir reminds her gently. Ciri scowls at him.

“Not about the important things,” she contends. Vesemir looks like he’d like to argue, but he lets it go to shoot Yennefer another unreadable glance.

Jaskier is getting pretty sick and tired of only ever being privy to about thirty percent of the conversations being held, here.

Eventually, Yennefer and Vesemir finish whatever silent conversation they’re having, and Vesemir huffs out a belligerent sigh, extending a hand as if to say, ‘go for it’.

Yennefer turns to Ciri. “Cirilla, you realise that I _cannot_ let this happen.”

This seems to be the wrong thing to say. Ciri swells with indignation, fixing a steely glare on the sorceress, and demands, “why can you not just _trust_ me?”

“You’re sixteen,” Yennefer says simply. “You haven’t seen enough of the world—”

“I have seen _plenty,”_ Ciri hisses, and oh—there’s a story there, Jaskier can only assume. She turns to Jaskier, fixing that harsh gaze upon him this time, and asks, “Geralt sent you here, no?”

Jaskier nods, and unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth to add, “he didn’t _want_ to, because he knew it would be dangerous, but he also knew that he _had_ to.”

Ciri nods. “That’s it, then. We’re going. _Both of us_ , and soon.”

“Cirilla,” Yennefer sighs, raising one pale hand to hold daintily over her eyes, “Geralt is not the standard by which you should be deciding if an idea is good or not.”

Eskel lets out a very quiet snort, and Jaskier bites his lip to keep from joining him. As much as it hurts to admit it, Yennefer… has a point.

“Yennefer,” Vesemir interjects scoldingly, though he doesn’t add anything, either.

Ciri just stays silent, and fuming.

“Ciri,” Yennefer says then, her voice gentle. “We’ll figure something else out. But whoever we send with you to do this has to be able to fight beside you, and forgive me if I’m… dubious, about this one.” She indicates Jaskier with a tilt of her head, and it isn’t even condescending, which is almost more irritating than if she _had_ been condescending about it. He isn’t even worth her condescension.

“Your problem isn’t with _him_ , though,” Ciri snaps. “It’s with me.”

Yennefer looks taken aback. “It’s—of course it isn’t—”

“You don’t think I’m ready,” Ciri accuses. “I _heard_ you. After all this time—”

“Ciri—”

“No,” she growls, “I’m done. I’m—I’m going to bed.” She’s sullen and drawn as tight as a bowstring, before she turns and stalks out the room.

Silence blankets the room, before Yennefer sighs, stands, and exits also, the long hem of her dress swishing around her legs the only sound to be heard.

“I’ll clean up,” Jaskier offers into the silence.

* * *

Jaskier wakes, distressingly, to a hand clamped over his mouth.

“ _Jaskier,_ ” a voice hisses in his ear, and he relaxes his grip on the knife under his pillow, and blinks, disoriented, into the darkness.

Ciri?

In the darkness, all he can make out is the outline of somebody looming over him, but he can feel the weight of a person perched, birdlike, over him, and—well. Not to be rude to either of the witchers, or to Yennefer, but he’s pretty sure Ciri weighs about half as much as one of them would, if it were _them_ leaning nearly their full weight onto him.

She pulls her hand away, and he murmurs, “Cirilla?” very quietly into the night.

She crawls off the bed. “Get dressed,” she whispers. “We’re going.”


	13. Chapter 13

Travelling with Ciri is far better than travelling alone.

For one, it means that when he sleeps at night, he can actually _sleep_ , rather than doze in a perpetual state of panic that something is going to catch his scent and attack, and he won’t wake up quick enough to save himself. For another, it means that while she hunts their dinner, he can set up camp, and while he cooks it she can go over his wards and correct them where needed. It makes for faster travelling than when he’d journeyed to Kaer Morhen, and they cross Kaedwen three days faster than when Jaskier had ridden across the country by himself, some weeks ago.

So, yes, travelling with Ciri is much better than travelling alone. That doesn’t mean it’s _perfect._

“What have you _done?”_ he asks her, slightly awed, as they both look sadly down at the far-crispier-than-Jaskier-remembers cooking pot.

“Um.” She winces. “I was trying to help with dinner?”

“That’s _dinner?”_

“I tried!” she throws her hands up in self-defence.

Jaskier pokes at the charred lump of… _something_ that sticks stubbornly to the bottom of the blackened pan. “What were you trying to make?”

“Uh, stew,” Ciri admits, scratching the back of her neck self-consciously. It’s endearing, and it reminds him of Geralt.

He quirks a brow at her. “How much water did you put in this?”

She frowns. “Only as much as there usually is in the stew.”

He sighs. “Okay, from now on, _stay away_ from the cooking utensils.” He wags his stick at her threateningly. “Also, for future refence, water _boils._ Always add more than you think you need. And _keep an eye on it.”_

She shifts, embarrassed. “Sorry, Jaskier.”

Jaskier sighs, sets the pot aside to be dealt with later, and focuses on salvaging what he can of what Ciri hadn’t added to her ‘stew’, deciding eventually to spit the meat over the fire.

Dinner, for the first time in the week since they left Kaer Morhen, is a quiet affair. Jaskier knows Ciri is a little embarrassed, but he hadn’t thought she was _that_ embarrassed, and if there’s one thing he’s come to learn about the teenager, it’s that she’s _never_ quiet.

“Hey,” he says, and nudges her knee with his foot. “What’s up?”

She scowls at him. “Nothing’s ‘up’.”

“Oh?” he raises his brows at her, clearly not convinced. “You haven’t said more than two sentences since we sat down to eat.” And even those had been clipped and polite. “I just figured you might want to talk.”

“Well I _don’t,”_ she snaps, suddenly and uncharacteristically venomous.

Jaskier raises the hand not holding his food up in a facsimile of surrender, deciding not to push any harder. Instead he continues eating, chewing thoughtfully as he turns his mind to other things. He wants to get his maps out to check over their route for tomorrow—they ought to be crossing the border from Kaedwen into Temeria soon, and he needs to decide where they can cross the Pontar River. They might end up having to cross south into Aedirn, first, before going west into Temeria—but first, heh as to wait out Ciri, and find out whatever it is that’s bothering her.

She reminds him, a little, of Hanna. His sister.

Jaskier hasn’t thought about his family very much at all, since he left, and he’s suddenly consumed by a wave of guilt that courses through him like an ice flow; he succumbs to one single shiver at the sensation before he manages to get a hold of himself. The food in his mouth tastes like ash.

“Yennefer’s going to hate me,” Ciri interrupts his reverie of self-pity with a thread from her own, and Jaskier scrambles to pull himself together into an approximation of a functioning adult.

“She won’t,” he says, with conviction. He’s about the last person to pretend to be an authority on Yennefer and, considering all the problems of his _own_ that he is soundly ignoring, he’s also about the last person who should even be offering advice; unfortunately, he’s the only person here.

Ciri is just going to have to make do.

She pulls her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around her legs, rests her chin atop them, and makes a very creditable impression of somebody’s whose world is ending when she says, “but she _will._ I just snuck out.”

“Ciri,” Jaskier sighs, “all teenagers sneak out. The gods know that I did.” Jaskier does not shed light on the fact that sneaking out of your school accommodation to go and get wasted with the cool older kids is a _little_ different to sneaking out of a witcher fortress into highly dangerous Fae territory to go and fight a very evil wizard, because that would be counter-productive. “Besides,” he adds, “didn’t she say you were being prepared to do this, anyway?”

Ciri scrunches her nose in distaste. “Well, yeah, but _years_ from now.,” she says, disgruntled. “Sneaking out in the middle of the night is pretty much the opposite of what she’d had planned.”

A thought occurs to Jaskier. “If she _really_ didn’t want you here,” he begins, an idea slowly forming, “surely she would have come for you?” Ciri looks confused, so he clarifies, “via portal,” and her expression clears, though she’s clearly still discomfited.

“Yennefer can’t portal outside of anywhere warded if she doesn’t want to be immediately attacked,” Ciri says slowly, like the words are being dragged out of her. Or possibly like it hadn’t occurred to her that Jaskier wouldn’t know this, and she’s just now realising.

“Oh,” Jaskier says cleverly. He considers leaving it be, but then he shakes himself a little, and asks, “er—why?”

“Was it explained to you that Faeries hunt magic?” she asks him bluntly, and Jaskier blinks.

“Yes,” he says, “but nobody really explained _how.”_

“Never mind about how,” Ciri says impatiently. “Just—the Fae hunt magic, yes? That means if Yennefer steps foot in Fae territory, they’ll come for her and they won’t stop until she’s dead.” She says it plainly, without emotion, and Jaskier winces at the matter-of-factness.

Then he pauses, and asks, “why don’t they hurt you, then?”

“We’re not sure,” she admits. “We only really… learnt about it in the last year. There was an incident where I accidentally portalled into Cidaris one day—”

 _What the fuck_ , mouths Jaskier.

“—and it took me three days to get back, and nothing bothered me the entire time.”

There’s a pause.

“Well,” Jaskier says eventually, because he has to say _something._ “…Well. That explains…” _approximately nothing._ “How—wh—do you know _why?_ Not even a little hypothesis?”

Ciri shrugs one shoulder, still concentrating on the ground. “Triss thinks it’s Destiny, but—”

“—fuck Destiny,” Jaskier finishes, and she nods.

“Yennefer thought that maybe it’s because I’m a Source, and have Elder blood, so it would be… overwhelming? To their senses? But that doesn’t make a lot of sense and I don’t think she really believes it, anyway.”

“Fantastic,” Jaskier quips. “Could it perhaps be another one of the Fae’s games?” _As in, are they suddenly going to show up one day to murder you, and I’ll be caught in the crossfire?_

Ciri shrugs again, and this time she looks up to meet his gaze, her face hard and uncompromising. “Do you want to go back?”

Jaskier doesn’t even stop to think about it. “No,” he answers, surprising even himself a little with the vehemence in his tone. “…No. Just… I’m glad you told me.”

Ciri nods, and looks down at the ground again. Jaskier eyes the drawing she’s made, surreptitiously tilting his head a little to try and figure out what it is, but Ciri sighs and swipes her hand over the dirt, erasing it.

“You can portal?” he suddenly asks, because—if she can portal, _why are they travelling to Gors Velen on foot—_

“I can’t really… do it on command,” she winces. “It’s tricky.”

Jaskier pauses, trying to consolidate that with the little he knows of magic. “How did you get to Kaer Morhen?”

She shrugs again. “Magic leaves a trace. I just followed what Yennefer had done—and I’ve been to Kaer Morhen loads of times, which helped. I know what it feels like. I’ve never been to the Island of Thanedd. And I’ve never taken someone else with me. Honestly, I’m not really _magical_ in the way you’re thinking. My power… it’s not very controlled.”

“Oh, good,” Jaskier says a little faintly. He tosses the stick his food had been impaled on into the fire, and watches as it catches, trying desperately not to consider it a metaphor for how this little excursion is going to go. “I’m out in the wild with an untrained but very powerful sorceress who may or may not be set upon at any time by every Faerie on the Continent.” Behind him, one of the horses snorts derisively, and Jaskier decides not to take it as an affront.

Ciri pulls a face at him. “It’s not as bad as all that,” she objects, “I’m telling you. It’ll be fine.”

“ _Fine,_ she says,” Jaskier mutters under his breath, and wonders again just what the _fuck_ he’s doing.

* * *

The rest of the trip, amazingly, goes smoothly.

Well… as smoothly as a journey spanning several countries _can,_ with a teenager and a man just barely out of teenager-hood.

Jaskier had wondered, at the beginning, whether he ought to take more responsibility for the _sixteen-year-old_ who had basically kidnapped him from his bed, thrown him on his horse with two hastily-packed bags, and had them galloping away from Kaer Morhen before the sun had even risen. Ciri quickly disabused him of this notion.

Cooking mishaps and unprompted deluges of momentous information aside, Ciri isn’t a bad travelling companion. Her black mare, Kelpie, is as different as night and day from Pegasus: feisty where the gelding is placid; raucous where Pegasus is quiet; the gelding is built, primarily, for speed, while Kelpie sports thick bones and enormous shoulders and is built to wear the heavy armour of war. Nevertheless, both of them manage the terrain, and they make good time.

It’s somewhere on the border between Aedirn and Temeria that Ciri brings up Geralt. For eight and a half days, they have talked of music and plays and Ciri has complained about magical theory that Jaskier can’t follow and Jaskier has regaled Ciri with tales of his years at university, and they’re _friends_ , but Jaskier doesn’t know _precisely_ where he stands with her.

She’s Geralt’s _daughter._ And Jaskier… doesn’t know what Geralt is to him.

He knows that they’re friends. He knows that he wants more. But precisely where they stand on that line between _friends_ and _more_ is unclear to him, and it makes him cautious around the princess.

So, one afternoon as they’re sweating under the blazing sun, walking the line between two countries, Ciri asks him, “so what are you to Geralt?”

Jaskier’s silence is kind of answer enough, but he feels the need to _explain._ Maybe because saying out loud all the things that have been clattering around in his head might help him untangle some of it.

“He’s… we’re friends, I think,” Jaskier begins cautiously, and shoots Ciri a mock glare when she snorts derisively. “I’m not saying we’re not _more_ —I’m saying we haven’t talked about it. I’m saying it’s complicated.”

“But you _want_ more,” Ciri prods, wrinkling her nose at the notion.

“Yeah,” Jaskier answers quietly. “He’s—he’s so much more than I thought I could ever have.” He surprises himself with the honesty, but when he rolls the words over on his tongue, he finds that they aren’t untrue.

Ciri still looks mildly disgusted. “Glad to know.” Jaskier can’t help but laugh at her expression.

“You wanted to know!”

She huffs, but doesn’t contradict him. Jaskier counts it as a win.

* * *

It’s later that evening, when Ciri brings it up again for what she promises is the last time. Jaskier isn’t sure whether he believes her, but he appreciates what she says anyway.

“I haven’t seen you two together,” she begins, “and I haven’t known you for very long. But for what it’s worth… Geralt needs someone. And I think you’ll be good for him.”

All he can say is a quiet, “thank you,” before they both agree to stop talking about _feelings,_ and Ciri hands him an apple she’s managed to forage.

“It looks like a butt,” he laughs, showing her. She rolls her eyes at him, but agrees.

* * *

A week past the border into Temeria, Ciri asks for clarification on one or two things.

“Y’know,” she says to him conversationally, breaking the silence they’ve been stewing in all day, “I’ve been wondering—Triss mentioned to me that Geralt—and the rest of the witchers, but she told me specifically about Geralt—had been… cursed.”

Jaskier quirks a smile. “To look like Fae, yeah.” He wonders, not for the first time, what Geralt looks like when he hasn’t had his features twisted into a horror.

Ciri’s silent for a moment, and then asks, “so… how—how did you…” She trails off, obviously unsure as to how she can phrase it.

“Befriend him?” he finishes for her, his smile stretching into a grin. Ciri nods. “Well, he didn’t try to attack me or anything, so I kind of figured that he wouldn’t. Also, the Faerie Ring itself was super helpful in keeping me from freaking out.”

Ciri looks _appalled._ “Jaskier,” she tries, helpless.

Jaskier’s grin grows sharper. “Ciri.”

“ _Jaskier.”_

“Ciri?”

“I— _Jaskier._ How the fuck are you still alive? Just—how old are you? How have you managed to live for this long?”

“You know,” Jaskier says thoughtfully, “Geralt said pretty much the same thing when he realised I’d believed him to be a Fae the whole time.”

Ciri gapes at him.

He continues, a little gleefully. “There was also this incident where I got lost in the forest and a Faerie was hunting me, and I could _tell_ that a Faerie was after me—but anyway, this wolf showed up and it sort of reminded me of Geralt, with the colouring, and I absolutely just followed it into the trees and trusted that it wouldn’t kill me. It did end up being Geralt, disguised with one of Triss’ spells, but. Yeah.”

Ciri’s horrified silence says all.

“Also—” Jaskier starts, thinking of midsummer, but Ciri interrupts him with some desperation.

“Jaskier, _please.”_

“ _Also,_ ” he continues over her, “on the midsummer, he and I danced, just away from the rest of my village’s celebrations—close enough that we could hear the music. And I believed him to be a Fae at the time.” Mostly. He’d had his suspicions, but had mostly discounted them as paranoia. At the memory, he can’t help his pointy grin softening into what has to be a dopey smile.

Ciri’s silent for several moments, the only sounds the quiet beats of their horse’s hooves on the springy grass, before she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who _wants_ to die as much as you do.”

Jaskier doesn’t have anything to say to that, because—in hindsight, that was true. Not so much that he wanted to _die;_ more that it wouldn’t have mattered very much if he had.

Ciri pales when he doesn’t answer her, so he takes a page from Geralt’s book and hums an acknowledgement, then crooks a smile and opens his mouth and sings her a tune, jaunty and light, and at her peal of surprised laughter he sings again, wracking his brains for lyrics he hasn’t read in—well, _years,_ probably.

* * *

Somewhere in the middle of Temeria, three weeks from Kaer Morhen and a week, perhaps, to the coast, Jaskier asks Ciri what her plan is.

She stares dully into the fire for a moment before answering. “How much do you know about how witchers fight?” she asks him, and he has to say _not very much._ “We carry two swords,” she begins, and Jaskier wonders silently at that use of _we—_ is she a witcher? Yennefer had certainly denied it—but he doesn’t interrupt.

“A steel one, for humans, and a silver one, for monsters. For Vilgefortz, I’ll use a silver sword, just to be certain.”

Jaskier’s own swords are steel, wrapped and packed carefully with the rest of his belongings. While travelling, they get strapped just behind the saddle, swinging down his horse’s side, so they don’t get in the way of the animal’s shoulders while they run. At night, they get carefully placed beside his bedroll, in arm’s reach.

 _Ciri’s_ swords stay strapped across her back, until she goes to sleep with them tucked against her side. He doesn’t know where she got them (he has a sneaking suspicion she pilfered them from Kaer Morhen, but seeing as he also doesn’t know where _Kelpie_ came from, he doesn’t want to make any accusations) but she cares for them every night, even if she hadn’t had a reason to unsheathe them since the evening before.

“And if he fights you with magic?” he asks, because the words _untrained sorceress_ can’t seem to unstick themselves from his mind.

She scowls into the dirt. “I can keep up a shield long enough to get close to him and put a sword through his ribs.”

Jaskier doesn’t know anything about magic, so he lets it go. He can’t shake the thought that she sounds like she’s convincing _herself._

* * *

They cross Temeria in a little over a week and a half. Three weeks since they left Kaer Morhen. Their horses are exhausted, having been pushed to their limits with the long hours and the rough terrain, and they reach Gors Velen a little after sundown, the city not visible in the nighttime.

They make camp near to a small river, a tributary to the Pontar and the estuary, the quiet sound of water breaking the silence of the night. The wind off the coast makes starting a fire more difficult than Jaskier really wants to be dealing with after a long, hard day of riding and the prospect of a difficult fight on the morrow. He gets the fire started with difficulty and boils water for dinner; it’s all he can do while Ciri skins the rabbit she’d shot earlier. They eat in silence.

He had assumed sleep would come easily.

It doesn’t.

He just—he can’t stop _thinking;_ on the horizon, the city walls are nigh indistinguishable from the black of the night sky.

Are there people there? Is it _possible_ for there to be people in there? Could anybody have survived the initial surge of the Fae, with the origin at such close proximity?

Jaskier remembers the first day. That first attack. How the lands around the manor had been slick with blood. How for _weeks_ afterwards, before they figured out what worked as protection and the volume of attacks waned, there were dozens of corpses littering the grounds—a nauseating number of which had been _human_.

He remembers thinking that the world had been overrun by the Fae. He remembers seeing three Faeries ripping into one of his horses and thinking, _this is how the world ends._

How had Gors Velen coped? Jaskier had been all the way in Redania, a country away; how had the people in Gors Velen fared? So many people packed so closely together, penned in by walls and cobblestone streets and city gates; they’d barely slow the Fae down, but for the thousands of people in the city, there would have been little for them to do but die.

He hopes there are survivors in there.

He doesn’t know whether he _believes_ that there are survivors in there, but he _prays_ that there are.

* * *

The sight of Gors Velen is much less sombre, come morning.

Thanedd Island, reaching proudly into the sky, cuts a striking figure behind the city, appearing improbably ordinary, considering what it contains.

“That’s Loxia,” Ciri informs him, pointing to the built-up lower quarter, to which the bridge connects from the bay of the northwest coast. “Unless you’re a mage,” she adds, “that’s the most that anybody ever sees of the island. That next bit—” she moves her finger, and Jaskier tracks it to what looks like a palace, “that’s Garstang.”

“I’ve never heard of any of those,” Jaskier tells her. “Just Aretuza.”

Ciri shrugs. “Garstang isn’t so important as the school, I guess,” she allows, “but it’s interesting. The palace walls block magic interference because a sorceress called Nina Fioravanti spent years creating an aura around it of anti-magic interference.”

Jaskier hums, absorbing this. “And Aretuza?” he prompts, flicking his gaze to the peak of the island, where the walls of the magical academy are stark against the rock of the cliffs.

Ciri cocks her head. “That’s where Yennefer was trained, decades ago,” she says, “but it’s changed since then. They began charging tuition, and only accepting the most highly-bred girls.” She wrinkles her nose; absently, Jaskier wonders where she picked up the habit, since it definitely wasn’t from Geralt or Yennefer.

“It’s all bureaucracy,” she grumbles, so sharply and hostilely that he can only blink at her, nonplussed. She catches his expression and scowls, and _there’s_ Yennefer. “What?”

“Just, uh—” he hesitates, “—that’s a pretty big word to come out of your mouth.”

She scowls harder. “I speak four languages.”

“ _Can you say ‘bureaucracy’ in all of them?”_ he asks, in fluent Nilfgaardian.

A frown creases her face. “Was that Nilfgaardian for ‘bureaucracy’?” she asks. In equally-fluent Nilfgaardian, she asks, “ _why do you know how to speak Nilfgaardian?”_

Jaskier gives her his most crooked grin. “ _You don’t know everything about me.”_

She shoots him a dubious look, but turns back to appraise Thanedd Island without saying anything further. “Tor Lara,” she says instead, and points back at the island, effectively ending that conversation. “The Tower of the Gull.”

Jaskier turns and looks. It’s the highest point on the island, needle-like and with far cleaner lines than the rest of the island’s crumbling structures.

“It’s the most powerful source of Chaos on the Continent,” she tells him, the mage’s word for magic falling easily from her tongue. “There’s this huge portal on top of it, completely unstable, called Benavent’s portal, although it’s only active some of the time—” she cuts off suddenly, and Jaskier looks away from the view of the island to find her frowning.

“What is it?” he asks; ordinarily, Ciri’s more than happy to talk about the things that interest her, for _hours—_ regardless of whether he’s actually listening. To see her so abruptly subdued is disconcerting.

“It’s just odd,” she says slowly. “Nobody knows how the portal works, really—according to legend, it’s meant to take to you Tor Zineaer, but it’s… chaotic, to put it mildly.” She tilts her head, catlike, at that last part, and Jaskier gets a sense that she has plenty of stories she could tell.

“That’s not _all_ of it, though. Benavent’s portal has such a strong magical field that if you try and teleport when you’re close by, then _something_ awful will happen to you.”

Jaskier kind of suspects that that was an understatement, but he doesn’t push. Instead, he asks, “what does that mean for our Faerie portal, then?”

Ciri shakes her head slowly. “A network of the surviving mages have been trying to figure that out for two years, now. We just… don’t know.”

“Well,” Jaskier says after a brief pause, “I guess it could be worse.” _No, it couldn’t._

“Yeah,” Ciri agrees, sounding relieved; Jaskier doesn’t correct her.

* * *

They skirt the city walls all the way to the coast, leaving their horses in an abandoned paddock attached to what was probably a farmer’s cottage, crumbling under the weight of what has to be decades of desertion. It takes them a whole day to do so on foot; twice, they have to squat beneath the foliage, wrapping themselves in runes and sigils and slathering themselves in mud for good measure, listening wide-eyed and shallow-breathed to the shrieking, skittering, snarling cries of far-off Fae.

“What do you suppose they’re doing?” Ciri asks him, long after the sounds of the Fae have faded away, but they haven’t yet dared to move on. He has to strain to make out her words, and even then he can’t help thinking, _too loud!_

“Hunting, perhaps?” he whispers back. _If there’s anything even there to hunt,_ he doesn’t say. Then he frowns as another thought occurs to him: “or perhaps not, if they’re being that loud. Maybe they’re not doing anything at all. Just…” he trials off, unable to think of anything that would fit. What on the continent could a Faerie be doing in its spare time?

Ciri’s silent, too, as if she’s wondering the same thing, and then her voice is hoarse as she murmurs, “we should keep going.”

* * *

The bridge is a problem.

They balance on a hillock to appraise it from afar, as Ciri whispers to him all she knows about getting onto Thanedd Island.

“The main way is by the bridge,” she says softly, trying to keep her voice from carrying over the terrain. “Which is only accessible from the city. There is another way, apparently—under the island, across the water; there are tunnels, we learnt.”

“Definitely a stealthier way of getting in there,” Jaskier considers thoughtfully. “…Though if we were to meet a Fae down there, we’d be fucked. I don’t like the sound of _tunnels.”_

Ciri hums an agreement, though she says, “we’d be fucked either way, though.”

Jaskier inspects the bridge again. “If we met a Faerie up there,” he nods at it, “we could probably jump into the bay to get away from it.”

“Would we survive?” It’s cold, the way she says it. Practical.

(She’s _sixteen,_ something in him curses, spitting at the idea that _sixteen year olds_ need to fight and die in wars.

If there was ever an end of the world, _this is it,_ he reminds himself.)

He just shrugs. “A Faerie will kill us,” he says. “A Faerie will kill anything. The fucking witchers themselves are helpless against them. Not a single mage managed to do anything against them. But people survive jumping off cliffs into water all the time.”

“People also _die_ doing that, all the time.”

“It’s still a better chance than we’d have against a Faerie,” he points out, and Ciri accedes the point.

He scans the horizon again, running through everything in his head, before he claps his hands to his knees and drags himself to his feet, then turns and offers Ciri a hand as well. “Let’s use the bridge,” he decides. “It’s not as if they won’t be able to _smell_ us coming.”

* * *

Jaskier lets Ciri take over from there, following her lead as she inspects each section of wall, sizing them up and calculating how she’d find the bridge from that part of the city. Neither of them have ever been inside Gors Velen, and neither do they have a map for the city, so she makes her decisions based off what they can see over the top of the wall and what Jaskier knows of the logic of city-building. _He_ had certainly never made a concerted effort to study the subject; at Oxenfurt, during his studies of the liberal arts, it was the kind of thing he just picked up.

They decide to wait until the morning; both of them are tired, and they only have perhaps an hour left of the day before the Fae will have even more of an advantage over them both.

They’re both silent, as they eat.

Jaskier has known Ciri for less than a month, but during that time they have spent almost all of it together. He knows the man who could arguably call her _daughter_ —and Geralt hadn’t ever mentioned her, but Jaskier knows that it was to protect her, because Geralt had been paranoid, always, of the monsters who had trapped him listening in.

He has known her for a little over three weeks and he thinks already that he’d die for her. He is under no illusions about tomorrow: for years and months and days he’s been working to _this moment,_ to finding a way to send the Fae back and then _doing it_ , and it’s huge and terrifying and Ciri is quietly having a conniption, he’s sure.

He doesn’t know what he can say, though. It seems odd to try and offer advice when he’s having his own little breakdown over the whole affair; he can’t stop thinking that if they _fail,_ there might not be another chance to do it—the Fae might patch up their vulnerability, and they’re powerful enough to irrevocably rid themselves of any weakness that might be exploited. They’re going to stay in this world and they’ll kill and they’ll keep killing until there’s nothing left, unless they’re stopped tomorrow, and Jaskier genuinely doesn’t believe he’s equipped to do it.

 _Ciri,_ yes, he has faith in; every inch of her has been honed to kill monsters, and she has Chaos running through her veins like nobody has ever seen. She was born to an emperor and a queen, raised by witchers and sorceresses; this is her _destiny,_ and he’s just… here.

So yes, Jaskier believes that he will die, tomorrow.

He feels a sudden stab of regret that he’d never explained to his family where he was going. They’ll believe he went mad, the same way as their mother and father. If this _does_ work, gods be good, and the witchers are freed, he hopes that Geralt will find them and explain, as much as he is able.

In the light of the fire, Ciri’s features are warped, the shadows turning her expression pinched and angry one moment, then soft and mournful the next. Her green eyes reflect gold flames. He wonders what she’s thinking.

They go to sleep without saying a word between them; there’s nothing they can say.

* * *

In the morning, they pack their bedrolls and their weapons and sling their packs onto their back, and then Jaskier follows Ciri into the city, watching her scramble up a wall with hand- and footholds he knows he’ll never manage to use; he takes a running jump at the wall and manages to just grab her hand, and she pulls him up with alarming strength for a sixteen-year-old.

They stand there for a moment, balancing atop the wall; sections of the city are guarded by wide walkways upon which guards can patrol; much of the city is enclosed by palisades, thick enough for a man to stand atop but only just. From their vantage point, they look over the corpse of Gors Velen; under any other circumstances, Jaskier might have imagined that the streets were empty simply because of the early hour; as it is, he half-assumes that every corner they turn will present a new horror, a new pile of corpses for them to sidestep, a new sign that this is the site of a slaughter. They don’t find _anything_ —not even bloodstains, as Jaskier had morbidly assumed, though he supposes that after all this time the rains will have washed much of it away.

Ciri has a good head for directions and she pulls him along to where the entrance to the bridge ought to be, and their footsteps sound on the cobble floors and echo off the buildings, and Jaskier winces with every scrape, every clatter. He’s almost certain they’re being watched; by whom, he couldn’t say, and he’ll admit that it _could_ just be his paranoia, so he keeps a little closer to Ciri and keeps a hand on the hilt of his sword and prays that his death will be quick, at least.

The bridge, when they find it, past the city gates and further into the bay, stretches over the sea and reaches toward Thanedd Island and Jaskier can’t help but feel like he’s walking to his doom, as they venture onto it. Still, they haven’t encountered anything; he finds it perplexing but he doesn’t think too hard about the proffered boon. The moment he overthinks all of this is the moment he backs out, and he has no _choice_ but to do this.

Ciri is coiled and tense and there’s an animal edge to her movements that Jaskier hasn’t seen before. In this instant, she reminds him more of Geralt than of Yennefer; she stalks in front of him with rage between her teeth and all he can do is follow.

Distantly, he hears a shriek. An air-splitting scream. Before him, Ciri kicks up her heels and bolts, and she’s a _lot_ faster than he’d given her credit for, pulling away from him instantly even though he’d started running the moment that she had. The clear the bridge in a minute, Ciri a good ten seconds ahead of him; she skids to a stop in Loxia then turns and watches him running, keeping an eye behind him; he can’t tell by her implacable expression if there’s anything there, but the fact that she hasn’t turned to hurry, yet, tells him that he should be fine. He doesn’t stop sprinting, however, winded though he is.

“That was close,” she tells him when he finally reaches her side, bending down to brace his hands on his knees and gasp for air. Half a minute passes again before he can answer.

“I think it was just scaring us,” he tells her, his chest still heaving. “Herding us here.”

“What a terrifying thought,” she says, her voice steady but her words belying her calm. “Hopefully we haven’t just walked into a trap.”

“We’ve _definitely_ walked into a trap,” he insists.

“It’s fine.”

“Yeah, if you count being in a trap as _fine.”_

Ciri snorts with amusement. “I do, actually. We’re not dead yet.”

Jaskier blinks after her as she turns, pulling out something small and metallic that begins to hum slightly as soon as it’s exposed to the air. “That’s not a very high bar, Ciri.”

* * *

The small object turns out to be witcher-made, and tells her when there are monsters nearby. It’s _also_ spelled to tell her when there are malicious enchantments in her area, and they learn that Loxia is clogged with so many trip wires and binding spells and runes meant to turn your insides into your outsides (Ciri had lingered over that one, once she’d discerned what it was; apparently it was ‘ingenious’ and ‘very cleverly put together’. Personally, Jaskier prefers the terms ‘fucked up’ and ‘absolutely not to be interfered with’), so traversing the terrain is slow going.

“It’s weird that we haven’t met any Fae,” Jaskier says, standing patiently behind Ciri as she frowns over her hands, outspread and faintly glowing.

“It’s _good_ that we haven’t met any Fae,” Ciri contests. She sounds slightly strained.

Jaskier side-eyes her. “You don’t believe that.”

She doesn’t contradict him; she clenches her hands, squares her shoulders, and says primly, “we need to move on—we’re not getting across this bit.”

Jaskier doesn’t question it. He just grabs her bag and his own, shouldering them before she can complain, and waits for her to stop glaring at him and move on so he can follow her, placing his feet exactly where she places hers. She’d told him that wasn’t necessary, but he refuses to take any chances.

“Do you think they’re watching us?” he asks, just to be contrary. Ciri hisses out a breath and flicks an annoyed look at him over her shoulder, and doesn’t answer. “Seriously, though,” he pushes, tripping over a rock and ungracefully righting himself with a half-aborted leap and a yelp he staunchly will _not_ admit to emitting; “they definitely know we’re here. _We_ know that they’re here, and they know that we know they’re here, and they know that we know that they know we’re here.” He gives Ciri a moment to digest this, before continuing. “It’s definitely weird that we haven’t seen even _evidence_ of them being here.”

“Jaskier,” Ciri murmurs, sounding distracted. “Shut up.” She’s knelt down to trace something on the ground, white chalk cutting clean lines across the dusty ground, and Jaskier knows better than to make a nuisance of himself while a mage is working, so he dutifully falls silent and keeps a wary eye out while Ciri does whatever it is she’s doing.

After several tense minutes, she finally stands up and announces, “there’s a way through here.” She snatches her bag off the ground before he can get to it and stalks off before he can complain, leaving him to hurry after her.

“All of these traps, all this magic—they weren’t here two years ago,” Ciri informs him as they follow the street upwards, making their way steadily through Loxia. Ciri keeps the device in her hand, held out before her, and Jaskier keeps as much of his attention on it as he does on her. “But they also feel like they were cast years and years and years ago—the trace of the sorcerer who laid them is so faint I couldn’t even tell you if they were male or female, just that they were here. I think they’re safeguards, carved into the stone with knife and chalk and blood, too, that could be engaged in case of emergency.”

Jaskier nods; this makes sense to him. “I can’t think of a bigger emergency than a huge portal opening in the middle of the sorceress school and a hundred million Faeries popping out of it,” he says sagely, and Ciri huffs a laugh.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Y’know,” Jaskier says, not willing to let the silence linger as he takes in the deserted state of Loxia, “I hadn’t expected this place to be so _creepy._ ”

“It’s not creepy, you’re just being a baby. What were you expecting?”

“I am _wounded,_ Cirilla, simply _wounded;_ how could you say such a thing?” He puts a hand over his heart, hamming up the dramatics, and Ciri scoffs and rolls her eyes at him, fighting a smile. “I was expecting something a bit less… corpse-y.”

“I thought you graduated Oxenfurt—”

“You knew what I meant, though!”

“—with _full honours,_ Jaskier,” Ciri mimics, wrinkling her nose at him when he swats her shoulder in retaliation. “This place was right in the line of fire. Think about it: hundreds and hundreds and _hundreds_ of Fae, all shooting out, ravenous and probably confused. Everybody who lived here is definitely dead.”

Jaskier examines the low, rough-hewn stone buildings, most of them without windows and doors. He’d thought at first glance that some ocean gale had burst all the wood, but if he looks closely, he can see claw marks in the stone, see ruts in the floor—

He looks away, bile rising in his throat.

* * *

More than once, Ciri sends him before her to scrub away runes or copy sigils with chalk into the sections of floor she indicates. Once, he uses a chisel and a hammer to tear the top layer of rock off of a wall, and his hands are bloodied and filthy when he finishes.

“You could do this yourself,” he tells Ciri once, as he traces over runes written in blood. He pulls his hand away, dips his fingers into the stomach of a rabbit Ciri brought him, and makes another adjustment. He tries not to gag.

“Only if I didn’t mind being trapped in there for the rest of eternity,” Ciri replies, bored.

“You would have found a way to do this without killing yourself,” he counters, flinching at the feeling of rabbit viscera slicking his fingers.

“Perhaps,” she allows, “but I wouldn’t have had the time. You can walk in and out of these traps with impunity because you’ve no magic to speak of. They don’t affect you. _Me_ , however…”

“Right, right,” he grimaces. “You’re the super special Child Surprise of a witcher, marked by Destiny, and—”

Ciri flicks a bit of rabbit gut at him, and he ducks, cursing, only for blood to spatter across his cheek and into his hair.

His glare ought to send her running, but instead she just grins at him, uncaring.

He finishes his work on the rune and stands, wincing as his knees and his back protest. Considering he’s only twenty two, his body should _not_ be this stiff after kneeling on the floor for half an hour. “Alright,” he sighs. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The path takes them past a checkpoint where they presume those that were in charge vetted anybody trying to reach the palace or the school; Ciri tells him about how it was barely staffed and rarely-used, as mages would often portal straight to the school and very, very few other people were ever allowed access, and Jaskier feels a little thrill as he passes the gates at the idea of breaking the rules. It’s mad and anybody who would have cared is long dead, but he can’t help the little bounce in his step as he walks unimpeded up path, towards Garstang and Aretuza.

* * *

The air around the palace feels sick. That’s the only way Jaskier can think to describe it.

He takes three steps towards it off of the rough path they’ve been following; Ciri stays staunchly where she is.

“There’s something in there,” she breathes.

Jaskier takes three steps back, hesitates, and then takes another two steps, putting Ciri firmly between it and him. She doesn’t even twitch.

“Can you tell what it is?” he asks, keeping his voice low, as if that would make a difference.

She pauses, sucks in a breath, and says, “no, just—she’s _hungry.”_

Ciri says ‘she’. Jaskier feels a bolt of pure terror, like nothing he’s ever experienced, grip his body in a vice, his limbs heavy as iron and his lungs constricting in his chest.

He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, grabs Ciri’s arm, and tugs her backwards. She goes with no complaint, scuffing the heel of her shoe very, very slightly as she steps towards him, and that’s when Jaskier grabs her hand, spins her around, and _bolts._

She hesitates for the barest second before following, shaking her head viciously, and they race through the brush upwards towards the looming figure of Aretuza, leaving Garstang and whatever resides within far behind them. Jaskier doesn’t stop running until he can hear Ciri’s footsteps even out, sure and swift and nimble over the nigh-impassable terrain, a direct antithesis to Jaskier’s own stumbling. He skids to a halt, stones tumbling from beneath his feet and bouncing down the path they’d just sprinted up, his chest heaving as he gasps in breaths. Ciri isn’t as winded, but she looks _spooked._

“Are—you—okay?” Jaskier manages to ask around great gasping heaves.

“That was—” she breaks off and shakes her head. “We should go.”

“Ciri.” When she doesn’t look at him, he reaches out and grabs her arm, pulling her to look at him. “ _Ciri._ I need to know that you’re okay to do this.”

“There’s nothing in this world that could send me back past that fucking place, Jaskier,” Ciri spits at him, wrenching her arm away, her whole body trembling a little. “We _have_ to go on.”

“And you’ll be alright?” he pushes; she can spit and hiss and snarl, but she won’t _hurt_ him and both of them know that, and Jaskier needs to be sure.

She rolls her eyes to the heavens and obviously and deliberately calms herself, straightening her shoulders and curling her hands into fists that don’t shake. After a few moments of calming her breathing, she turns her head to look at Jaskier, her eyes deadly serious.

“That thing—I know what she is. She could have had me, then. She didn’t, though, and I’m alright, and we have to _get this done.”_

Jaskier pierces both of her eyes with his own gaze, not wanting to admit that they _don’t have a choice, really,_ before he dips his head in a nod and turns to regard Aretuza. “Let’s go, then.”


	14. Chapter 14

The great gates of Aretuza are wedged open with rubble. Inside, the proud institution of magic is carved out and gutted, the floors and walls rent with great scars from claws and bolts of magic; shattered furniture and rotting fabric are swept into the corners of the halls like storm debris, the result of magical blasts that sent did little against the overwhelming onslaught of monsters but managed to ravage the furnishings.

There aren’t any bodies. Jaskier doesn’t think about what happened to them.

They pass through the doors and Ciri stops so suddenly that Jaskier doesn’t notice she’s no longer at his side until he turns around to inspect the other corners of that first room, flicking his eyes over the doors with disinterest until he notices Ciri, frozen in place.

He eyes her for a moment, trying to decipher her reason for stopping, before taking several cautious steps back in her direction and murmuring, “Ciri?”

She doesn’t even blink. Her eyes are unfocused, her stare vacant; he waves his hand in front of her face and when he draws it back, sees that he’s caught her attention. Those green eyes pin him down and he shudders.

“We’re fucked,” she tells him bluntly.

“Uh—” Jaskier glances around, trying to find an immediate reason as to _why_ they’re fucked (barring the fact that the fate of the world apparently rests in the hands on a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-two-year-old), and, coming up empty, turns to back to her and asks, “care to explain?”

She grimaces. “This whole building feels like it’s about to be torn apart.” Her hands shake by her sides, though she’s trying to curl them around her legs so that he can’t see.

“…Right.” It’s about the only thing that Jaskier can think to say. “Is this… an immediate concern?” Or—”

“It’s not going to happen _right now,”_ Ciri interrupts him, her eyes sliding in and out of focus as she examines whatever it is only she can see. “But there are two huge portals on top of this building and every time Benavent’s portal becomes active they tear at each other a little more. That might actually be why there aren’t any Fae here,” she muses, like she hasn’t just shot a cold bolt of dread and lodged it between Jaskier’s ribs.

“Sounds promising,” Jaskier deadpans, quirking his brows to express the irony. Ciri smiles unhappily at him.

“I think the air is full of poison,” she tells him. “Toxic magical residue.”

“You _think?”_ Jaskier demands, yet even as he says it he’s wondering why _that’s_ the part he takes exception to. “Wait—poison?” Fucking _what?_

She shifts uncomfortably, before saying quietly, “I’m sorry, Jaskier.”

That scares him more than possibly anything else she’s said to him.

Which is _saying something._

His chest is doing something strange and he can’t seem to get the breath for words, so he cocks hi head helplessly at her and hopes she gets the message.

“Jaskier— _breathe,_ ” she’s saying.

 _I’m trying,_ he curses silently, but she steps forward and grabs his hand and grounds him, enough that he can suck in a breath and ease his burning lungs.

“Fuck,” he manages to gasp out; Ciri lets out a little giggle that’s only a bit hysterical, and they stand there clutching each other for several heartbeats.

“Am I going to die?” he dares to ask.

Ciri’s silent for just a beat too long, before she says, “if the mad wizard and the Faeries don’t kill you, then… I genuinely don’t know.” It’s a terrible answer, and they both know it.

“But your best guess?” To be completely honest, Jaskier isn’t really sure _why_ he’s pushing; in all likelihood, he won’t live to see the end of the day.

“I don’t know what the magic will do to you, Jask’,” Ciri tells him. It’s the most serious he’s ever seen her. “Worst case scenario—yes, you die. It might even be a _likely_ scenario. The air is saturated with raw, unfiltered chaos. Who knows what the fuck it’s doing to you?”

This is not at all what Jaskier wanted to hear. “What about you?” he asks Ciri, who looks unnervingly calm about this.

She scrunches her nose. “I’m sure it can’t be good for me,” she says, “but I’m a Source. I’m _already_ permeated with magic. I have resistance to it.” She flicks her gaze away, unable to maintain eye contact.

They’re in Aretuza. Somewhere around here is Vilgefortz, whom they need to kill so that the portal can be shut, so that the Fae can be cut off from a significant source of their power (or something—the explanation for that part had gone so far over his head that Ciri had given up).

“Well,” Jaskier says (because all of this is going to be boxed up and dealt with _later_ , because there’s only one thing _to_ say), “I guess there’s no going back now.”

Ciri looks miserable, but she straightens her spine and squares her shoulders and says, “let’s go, then.”

* * *

Jaskier can’t imagine coming to this place for schooling.

It’s _awful._

The stone walls leech the heat from the air, from his lungs, from his bones. They prowl the corridors, pausing every so often so Ciri can inspect some part of the building or other, listening as intently as they can. Every whisper of wind, every rattle of debris, every scrape of their own heels on the stone floor, sends them skittering into frozen, terrified silence as they wait for some monster to appear.

Jaskier wants to breach the silence, to ask Ciri for any stories Yennefer might have told her about Aretuza, to pretend just for a little bit longer that he isn’t about to die.

He doesn’t, of course.

Instead he marinades in the silence.

It’s probably only half an hour, but it feels like a fucking lifetime passes before he hears and feels a low humming. It reverberates in the walls, the floors; it echoes through the corridors they pass; eventually, it seizes Jaskier’s very bones, until he’s trembling with it, until his head is splitting with the strain of it.

Ciri seems less affected by it. She casts him worried glances, which he ignores—the idea of his death is no longer so strange to him.

* * *

Seeing Vilgefortz for the first time is underwhelming.

The humming doesn’t cease, not even for a moment, but Jaskier’s mind seems to deem it no longer a _priority,_ and the shaking in his limbs subsides and the chattering of his teeth slows until he’s desperately uncomfortable, but not that bothered by it.

Vilgefortz becomes his new concern.

Jaskier’s first thought is, _oh, he’s handsome._

His next immediate thought is a surprised, _he looks… normal._

Because—because it’s true; Vilgefortz sits in an overstuffed armchair amongst stacks of books, piled haphazardly on bookcases that have apparently survived the wholesale destruction in the rest of Aretuza. A tome is laid open in his lap, and he seems thoroughly engrossed. Apparently. Ciri and Jaskier stand somewhat awkwardly in the entrance to the room, alternating between gaping at the first intact furniture that they’ve seen on Thanedd Island, and gaping at Vilgefortz himself.

He licks his finger and turns a page, utterly disinterested in the two people stood in his doorway.

Jaskier clears his throat. It’s deafening in the otherwise-silence of the room.

Ciri says, “ _hey_ ,” and when there is no reply, she snaps out, “ _Vilgefortz.”_ It isn’t until they exchange a glance, Ciri shrugs, and flicks a dagger at Vilgefortz’ face, that he acknowledges their presence in any way.

In hindsight, it’s a terrible idea.

The dagger stops halfway along its trajectory and goes clattering unceremoniously to the ground. The book closes with a _thump_ and is settled carefully on the small table set beside the armchair. Vilgefortz’ eyes are terrifyingly clear, and perilously genial. Jaskier wants to quiver under that stare, and thinks that, if it were aimed at _him,_ then he might; as it is, he musters every bit of recalcitrance that he possesses, and does his best to loom. He doesn’t think it works, but his pride insists that he doesn’t back down.

“I expected Yennefer to have had a better influence on you, young lady,” Vilgefortz says conversationally, “but I suppose your temperament is only to be expected, having been raised amongst witchers.” The way he says _witchers_ is already enough to raise Jaskier’s hackles, but he’s still somewhat stuck on the first part of what Vilgefortz said.

“Are we talking about the same Yennefer?” he demands, “because Yennefer’s kind of a bitch.” Beside him, Ciri stifles a snicker.

Vilgefortz barely spares him a bored, utterly disinterested glance, before focusing back on Ciri. “Cirilla,” he says imperiously, “do control your _pet._ If you’ll bring humans this high into Aretuza, you’ll do this place the honour of making sure they behave themselves.”

 _You brought a fucking Fae army into Aretuza, you dick,_ Jaskier seethes. Outwardly, he bristles, and begins to say, “you fucking—”

“Enough, Vilgefortz,” Ciri interrupts, before Jaskier can get himself turned into a toad, or something. “Let us not play games. You know why we’re here.”

Vilgefortz smiles thinly. “So quickly to the point, too. Are the youth taught manners anymore?”

 _Not when we’re talking to fuckheads like you_ , Jaskier itches to say, but doesn’t. Ciri simply rolls her eyes and says, “you aren’t even a century old.” Now, in Jaskier’s personal opinion, a century is more than old enough to have some opinions on _the youth,_ but he keeps his mouth shut about that one, because he absolutely isn’t about to agree with the mage.

Vilgefortz bares his teeth in something that’s definitely displeased and not-quite-a-smile. Jaskier is reminded intimately of a predator—perhaps a wolf, or some great cat, lurking in the bushes. “So _rude_ ,” he growls. “Yes, Cirilla, I know why you’re here. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Tell me; what have you learnt of chaos, thus far?” He looks at her expectantly.

Ciri flicks an unsure glance at Jaskier, before turning back to Vilgefortz. “Pardon?” she asks politely. Jaskier’s teeth itch. _Court politics._

Vilgefortz displays a wide smile, showing all of his teeth, and Jaskier resists the urge to shift uncomfortably. “Think of it as an elder taking an interest,” he says amiably. “It is _so_ important to ensure that young people are taught properly. None of this bureaucratic nonsense that Aretuza has stooped to, in recent years,” he adds with disdain, and some of the tension leeches from Ciri’s stance, just a little.

“Yennefer told me the same thing,” she admits. “That Aretuza used to be about _learning_ , not about… about politics, or popularity.”

Vilgefortz nods. “As coarse as she is, Yennefer was always favoured by Tissaia. The two of them are much the same.”

Jaskier doesn’t recognise the name, but Ciri apparently does, because she stiffens and hunches her shoulders and generally looks uncomfortable.

“Tissaia?” she asks, quietly, and Vilgefortz nods with an odd little smile. “I, uh—I heard that she died,” Ciri says carefully, and Vilgefortz’ smile vanishes.

“No,” he denies. “No, she did not—she fled, the coward, and is alive.”

“Right,” Ciri says. “That’s—that’s good.”

Jaskier is bored of this. “Vilgefortz,” he says sharply, and hears his father in the sharp commanding ring of his voice. He squashes down the surge of emotions that that brings, instead saying, “you know why we’re here.”

Vilgefortz rolls his eyes, then there’s a pause, where he inspects them both with an intensity that makes all of Jaskier’s instincts scream for him to bolt. “you must be here for _her.”_ Vilgefortz says abruptly.

Jaskier frowns, somewhat confused, and asks, “the portal… is a ‘her’?”

Vilgefortz shoots him a spectacularly annoyed look, which, hey, Jaskier maybe deserves, but it’s still rude.

“No,” he spits, his voice dripping with arrogance, then taps the side of his head. “ _Her._ In my head.”

Now Jaskier is very definitely confused; judging by the look Ciri returns when he shoots her a questioning glance, she doesn’t know what the fuck Vilgefortz is talking about, either.

“What?” he asks, doing his best not to concentrate on the surreal quality of the situation. He finds that if he pretends that the fate of the world doesn’t hinge on how this conversation ends, he can relax a lot more.

Vilgefortz rolls his eyes skyward and then shoots _Ciri_ a frustrated glare, as though commiserating with her about Jaskier, and Jaskier doesn’t know whether he ought to be insulted or pleased with this reaction. Either way, Vilgefortz doesn’t answer him.

Ciri cocks her head at the mage, and straightens her spine into something resembling the princess she was born as. Her voice echoes with clear command as she demands, “Vilgefortz: tell me what you mean.”

Vilgefortz stares blankly at her for a moment, then gets to his feet so suddenly that Jaskier draws his sword instinctively, and doesn’t sheathe it even when all the mage does is stalk to the window on the opposite side of the room. All that Jaskier can see through it, when he looks, is the endless sky.

Vilgefortz stares silently through it for so long that Jaskier begins to suspect he’s forgotten that they’re even there, before abruptly he speaks. “Her,” he says, so softly Jaskier has to strain to hear him. “In my head, _always_. How can you not feel her there?”

Ciri leans in to Jaskier’s side, and whispers, “he’s insane. If he was—possessed, or whatever, then I’d know.”

Jaskier nods, and tightens his grip on his sword. “Want do you want to do?” he murmurs, not taking his eyes off Vilgefortz.

He can hear the frown in Ciri’s voice when she says, “I want to try something.”

She doesn’t tell him anything further, so all he can do is watch when she pads slowly forwards, each of her footsteps silent and deliberate, waving a hand behind her when Jaskier makes to follow, keeping him rooted by the door. He wants desperately to call her back, to ask her what the _fuck_ she thinks she’s doing, to talk the plan through with her instead of her just haring off with half a scheme and a prayer, but that would mean potentially alerting Vilgefortz to her approach. All he can do is _watch._

“Vilgefortz,” she calls, her voice low and soothing. As though she were talking to a wounded animal. “Vilgefortz, listen. Just listen. You don’t have to—to say anything, or do anything—I don’t know what she did to you, what she’s _still_ doing to you, or what she’s doing in your head—but it doesn’t have to stay like this. You could be free of her, if you helped us. You could—”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Vilgefortz turns, his face contorting awfully into something that’s only human by the barest definition of the word, and snarls out a garbled string of curses in about three different languages that Jaskier can identify, and more besides that he can’t. Vilgefortz lifts his hands and the room bursts into a kaleidoscope of colours: a thousand, thousand shards of coloured glass, and Jaskier’s head threatens to burst with the _roar_ of percussive magic, overwhelming him.

Jaskier staggers, his sword slipping through his fingers. Ciri yowls and spreads her own arms wide, sending her own magic right back at him, somehow releasing the pressure in Jaskier’s skull and muting the spectrum of his vision. Her power combats Vilgefortz’ in an awesome reckoning of wills, with Jaskier caught in the periphery of it, leaving him dazed and drained and unsteady. Ciri shrieks again, and leaps towards Vilgefortz, knives drawn, and he meets her with a sword plucked from nowhere and a feral grin.

“Vilgefortz,” Jaskier mouths, feeling as though his head is about to split open, and then says it louder, as though calling the mage’s name would accomplish anything. It sharpens on the grind of his throat, hoarse and desperate, cutting itself a new edge on the turning gears of his mind as he frantically pulls himself together again.

He thinks, for the first time in a long time, _I’m going mad._

He thinks—and for the first time ever, he really, truly accepts it— _I’m going to die._

He thinks, _fuck it._

Jaskier runs forward himself, loosing a hoarse yell and aiming for Vilgefortz’ legs while his back is turned. It’s a cheap shot and his old sword master would be appalled, but Jaskier has had infrequent practise with fighters who could truly be considered ‘skilled’, and running solo through forms only works to keep muscles strong. The forward-and-back of a fight is forgotten territory for him.

Vilgefortz steps neatly out of his way, and takes advantage of Ciri retrieving a knife he’s just managed to disarm from her, to turn and parry Jaskier’s next thrust. He hisses furiously through his teeth, his expression morphing further towards what Jaskier can only describe as _demented_ , before flinging a blast of fire directly at Jaskier’s face with his free off-hand.

Jaskier squawks and leaps inelegantly out the way, catching his balance at the last possible second and pivoting. It’s a move he’s practised over and over and it saves his life now, giving him time to bring his sword up and prevent Vilgefortz from gutting him.

Then Ciri jumps in from behind and Vilgefortz is forced to retreat to the side, lest he get pinned between them.

Jaskier follows him with his sword; Ciri drops her knives and flings magic at him with a yell. Vilgefortz defends against them both.

It’s hot, sweaty work; Jaskier’s sword hand is no longer as calloused as it ought to be and the room isn’t large enough for a swordfight and a mages’ duel, and two bookcases get set on fire and Jaskier is thrown bodily into a third with a blast of magic so terrible and absolute it sends blood dripping from his nose and the hearing in his left ear abruptly goes silent. The floor thereafter is slippery with books scattered pages and Jaskier’s balance is thoroughly shot, which is probably why he ends up getting knocked out.

He remembers staggering forward towards where Vilgefortz and Ciri are spinning around one another quickly enough to make Jaskier feel sick just looking at them. He remembers lifting his sword, remembers Ciri driving Vilgefortz backwards two strides, remembers bringing his blade in an arc to meet Vilgefortz’ unprotected neck.

He remembers the mage glowing white, his skin pulsing with it, and Ciri’s frightened eyes meeting his half a moment before a shockwave ripples out, catches Jaskier, and tosses him easily backwards into the wall at the other end of the room.

He remembers the pressure growing enough that he screams, and when the darkness comes for him he welcomes it gladly.

* * *

He wakes up amidst rubble.

Ciri and Vilgefortz are nowhere in sight; he strains his ears to listen, and hears nothing. The floor is littered with ash and charred splinters of wood, though in a perfect circle around where he is laid, there is no sign of any fight at all—Ciri, protecting him, he assumes.

His left knee twinges uncomfortable when he stands, and he thinks he’s injured an ankle; careful rotations cause him to hiss out his discomfort between his teeth, and he gingerly puts weight on it. He stands, just about.

He can’t hear out of his left ear. Turning makes him dizzy, his head queerly heavy and off-balance, and a quiver of fear shoots down his spine when he brings up his left hand to snap his fingers, and he hears nothing.

His sword is… gone. He has a knife sheathed, still, and it will have to do.

With slow, pained steps, he surveys the room, picks the most-damaged exit, and heads towards it, finding evidence of where Ciri and Vilgefortz must have gone while fighting. Why they migrated so far, he doesn’t know—perhaps a magic thing? Or just that is how the fight progressed.

He follows the lead of scorched walls and furrowed floors through Aretuza, the trail of fresh destruction thankfully easy to spot against the two-year-old rubble. It leads him upwards, high enough that when he inspects one of the tall windows, the view outside sends him skittering away from it, high enough that he knows he must be in Tor Lar: The Tower of the Gull.

He thinks he ought to have noticed entering the place of such Chaos, but he’s half-deaf and dead on his feet and his head swims with an odd, unnatural pounding, and it’s only his hand on the wall at his side that keeps him from falling to his knees at all.

In these corridors, the air tastes of metal and ash and feels oddly oppressive, charged, like the lull before a storm. He imagines lightning crackling through these halls and then realises that in the silence, he finds the rooms oddly bereft of… something. He can’t imagine what used to happen here. Magic, perhaps; lessons, or experiments. He passes one room lined with counter space and imagines that it once might have been a place to brew potions.

Everywhere he passes is abandoned, derelict.

He walks for what feels like _hours,_ heading further upwards, before he finally reaches the room through which everything first arrived—the room in which everything must have began. The door itself is undamaged—so completely undamaged, in fact, that it looks nearly terrifyingly out of place amid the streaks of soot and destruction that paints the walls on either side, the mark of an enormous fireball, he imagines.

He prods the door with careful, searching fingers. Nothing. The handle is cool to the touch, though he’d imagined it might be scalding, and it turns easily in his hand, the heavy door opening easily and soundlessly. Almost like it _wants_ him to enter.

He steps inside, and freezes.

The portal isn’t how he’d imagined it. It doesn’t look much like they do in illustrations: a flat mirror, or a window through which the other side of it can be seen. No: this portal is a rough and billowing sphere of mist. It reminds him distantly of fog on winter mornings, or the spray of water that is thrown up from the bottom of a waterfall. It reaches absently above his head and is vaguely as wide and long as it is tall, and after several moments of staring, his head begins to throb and involuntarily he finds himself glancing away to relieve the strain on his eyes.

It’s then that Jaskier notices them. On the floor, collapsed against opposing sides of the room like the rest of the scattered debris, lie Ciri and Vilgefortz.

From where Jaskier leans, exhausted and aching, against the side of the cracked doorframe, he can see Ciri’s chest rising and falling, the blood on her head crusted dry already, all of her limbs splayed awkwardly but not brokenly. She’s alive. She’s _alive._ He hadn’t realised until now just how much he had been afraid of the opposite—how much dread had settled in him, when he’d woken and found that she wasn’t there. _She’s alive._

Alternately, Vilgefortz lies still and pale and corpse-like against the other wall. There’s one of Ciri’s knives embedded in his thigh and a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, one of his arms bent awkwardly beneath him, his sword laying innocuously several feet away. His hair is matted with blood and greyed with dust, his eyes squeezed shut, and he doesn’t so much as twitch when Jaskier stalks over to him and kneels at his side, spitting a mouthful of blood of his own onto the ground, swiping messily at his chin where some of it has collected and trickled down.

The air in here is impossible to breathe.

Jaskier chokes, and then it’s like he can’t stop; he doubles over, leaning completely against the wall at his side when his leg buckles, and he’s dry-heaving and spitting out blood and bile and sucking down air that’s too hot, too foul, burning his lungs and twisting them up—

And then he’s panicking, because he’s _dying._

He falls to his knees. Or perhaps he was already on his knees. He doesn’t remember. He remembers putting his palms flat on the floor, his body jerking as he heaves for air, seizes, and spits out black ichor, glistening and slimy on the floor, incongruous next to crimson blood and clear bile.

It’s a little easier to breathe afterwards, though. He resists the urge to rest of his forehead on the floor, because if he does that then it’ll be very easy to lie down, and then he _knows_ that he won’t get up.

Instead, he pushes himself onto his knees, sways, and gets to his feet, his knee and his ankle protesting in equal measures so that when he trembles, neither leg gives way, and he does not fall to the floor.

Distantly, he notes the pressure in his head growing, taking more, pressing down on his thoughts and his emotions. He can no longer taste the acrid bile nor the bitter ichor, nor the metal of his blood. His left ear is silent and his right ear rings with a piercing shriek he isn’t convinced is real. He smells, inexplicably, a bonfire.

He stumbles to Vilgefortz’ side, falling into the pool of slick blood that grows with each beat of the sorcerer’s heart, and yanks the knife from is leg. Jaskier is sprayed with blood as it begins to pump steadily from the wound, soaking his clothes and the floor. He doesn’t shift away.

He inspects the rest of Vilgefortz, but he sees nothing else; charred robes and impressive bruises on the patches of bared skin that he can see, and a clean slice across his cheek, but nothing else. He glances up, and finds that Vilgefortz’ eyes are open—watching him. One of his pupils is so dilated that the iris is nearly completely hidden, and it stares dully at the ground, the blood vessels in the eye burst so badly that Jaskier sees not a speck of white. The other is fixed intently on Jaskier.

He feels sick.

Vilgefortz darts his tongue out to taste the blood on his lips, and croaks out, “don’t.” Jaskier flinches, and then the sorcerer whispers, “ _please.”_

 _Don’t._ Don’t what? Don’t kill him? Don’t let him bleed to death? Don’t use these last moments to enact some revenge, some petty, final act, in which Jaskier finally makes Vilgefortz pay for everything that he has personally done?

Perhaps he’s saying, _don’t let me die like this. Don’t just leave me here. Please put an end to this._

Jaskier isn’t sure which he’s hoping for, when he buries the knife between the dying man’s ribs.

Into his heart.

He stays there, with blood soaking into his breeches, as the sorcerer’s faint quivering finally stills.

He watches as Vilgefortz’ single working eye rolls back, the other staring uncomprehendingly at the ground. Lifeless.

He stays there, kneeling, until the blood no longer pours so voraciously from Vilgefortz’ thigh.

The pressure on his lungs that had attacked him so viciously when he first entered the room abates suddenly, and he takes his first full breath since he came inside.

He watches the flush fade from the corpse’s cheeks. He’s tempted to reach out and close its eyes, but that’s a little too macabre, even for him, and besides—he doesn’t really think the body would look like it was sleeping. As life fades from the body, as it begins to look less and less like a person and more and more like a thing, Jaskier wonders, distantly, at the fact that he’s _still alive._

He considers for a moment losing his composure, or perhaps just catching his face in his hands and bursting into tears, but—there’s still the portal, and Ciri. He’s the adult here. This rests on his shoulders.

Instead, he pulls himself painfully to his feet, grimacing at the blood saturating his trousers, and turns to find Ciri groggily sitting up, wincing as she puts a hand to her head. Her eyes meet Jaskier’s and her lips pull into a wild, dreadful grin. “Is he dead?” she asks him, blood coating her teeth.

“He is,” Jaskier tells her, his voice tinny and unattached to his own ears.

Then the portal flares and seethes, and Jaskier releases a string of expletives in a plethora of languages as the mild-but-rapidly-growing feeling of _success_ is abruptly squashed. Nobody had mentioned this part.

_What the fuck do we do?_

The mist-like nature of the portal shifts and flows and it crystallises, a thousand tiny droplets of—of magic, or something—and then clump together into hundreds of tiny little gems, or scales on a fish, or leaves on a tree, or feathers on a bird. Each one of them ripples through a spectrum of colours—some of which Jaskier has never seen before, and could not describe, and trying to recall them in the instant after they flicker away yields only confusion and frustration—before they settle, and—

And—

And, oh, _fuck_ —

And Jaskier can _see._

He sees where the Fae came from.

He never wants to see it again.

“Ciri,” he says, voice so hoarse that he has to try three times before he manages it. “Ciri—call Yennefer. I know—I know you have a way.”

He tears his eyes away from the portal, tears soaking his face, blood pouring freely from his nose and he thinks his left ear (that he still can’t hear from, he realises a bit hysterically) to watch Ciri bite her lip and pull her ring from her finger and crush the jewel embedded in it.

For a moment, long enough for Jaskier to think, _motherfucker, she isn’t coming, is she_ , and then Jaskier hears a _pop_ behind him.


	15. Chapter 15

“Oh,” Yennefer says. Jaskier whips around to find her staring at the corpse, cooling on the floor. Jaskier can’t even think of it as ‘Vilgefortz’ anymore because that thing on the floor is worlds away from the bright and terrible madman that Jaskier had spoken to, that had brought ruin to the world.

Jaskier hasn’t been given much reason to like Yennefer, but seeing her stand there, staring down at Vilgefortz with that conflicted, oddly vulnerable expression, tugs at even his heartstrings.

“Yennefer,” he rasps, his voice muffled to his own ears—is his speaking overloud, in this deathly-quiet room? He’s half deaf and drowning in the magic of this place—and she turns on her heel to look at him, her fact shuttering when she notices who called her. He can pinpoint the moment she sees the portal, because her face betrays her immediate horror.

“Oh,” she breathes; he has to strain to hear her. “Oh, _fuck.”_

“What do we do?” he demands.

Yennefer shakes her head, unable to tear her eyes away. “I—I don’t—”

“I can—” he hears Ciri gasp out, and he turns to find her staggering away from the wall she’d managed to brace herself against, leaving bloodied footprints behind her. He’s suspended in place, his legs impossibly heavy, as he watches her stumble to the portal, then _stick her hands in it,_ the crystals closest to her shivering with increased fervour. She cups her hands around several of them, before she screws up her face, bares her teeth, and _roars,_ looking every bit the wolf she’s been raised to be.

As one, the crystals quiver, sending a thousand flecks of light cascading through the room in an inescapable riot of colour. Each of the crystals hum and then fly into one another, some inexorable force pulling them together; they crash into one singularity, colourless yet shimmering through every possible hue; enormous and miniscule; scalding and freezing; silent and deafening—

Somebody—Yennefer—grabs his arm and wrenches him around so he’s no longer looking at—at _it,_ and he finally manages to suck in a breath. It’s only now that he notices his burning lungs, starving for air, and he gasps like a dying man and tries not to fall down with the strain of everything catching up to him.

His hearing returns with a vengeance and a sickening _pop_. He tilts his head, trying to relieve the pressure, or at least some of the pain; it feels as though somebody has poured boiling water into his ear, or perhaps stuck a knife in there, and he stumbles as his balance shifts _again._ He can hear a strange hissing and laboured breathing and the distant rumbling of what could perhaps be thunder. He can hear Yennefer mouth a litany of curse words. He can hear the hitch in Ciri’s breath.

He’s so, so tired—just a quick nap would set him right, he’s certain, and they have time—they _have_ to have time, because his eyes are sliding closed—

Somebody snags his arm and tries to tug him along. He resists as best he can, his tongue suddenly thick and heavy in his mouth when he tries to explain to them how _tired_ he is. They’re insistent, and he’s too tired to put up much of a fight, so he follows along with an incoherent grumble.

The instant he steps out of the room, Ciri and Yennefer before him, the great pressure releases and the exhaustion recedes, leaving him feeling loose and untethered in his own skin.

“What—” he gasps out, “—what did you _do?”_ Rather than answering immediately, Yennefer breaks into a run, covering the distance of the hallway in swift, fluid strides, and he curses heavily as he follows. She runs with the same coiled grace of a mountain cat; beside her, Ciri is bloodied and unkempt and bounds forward with the untiring strength of a young wolf. She glances back at him, her expression too complicated for him to decipher in the moment.

“I shattered it. Kind of,” Ciri answers him.

“You didn’t just _shatter it,_ ” Yennefer hisses out. She sounds strained, while she deftly navigates the corridors, leading all of them around turns and down staircases, from Tor Lara into Aretuza, and downwards. Jaskier doesn’t recognise any part of where they are.

“You—you _inverted_ it, somehow. No, I don’t have time to explain, and even if I did you wouldn’t understand,” Yennefer heads off Jaskier’s next question with a rather impressive scowl, considering her chest is still heaving with the effort of sprinting. “Just know that the portal has been—collapsed, for lack of a more accurate term that you would understand, and now we need to get out of here, before we die horribly.”

“Motherfucker,” Jaskier grunts, with feeling. Ciri echoes the sentiment.

The decision to pause and catch their breath is a unanimous one. Jaskier takes the opportunity to ask, “what’s going to happen?”

Yennefer looks grim as she answers. “It’s going to explode,” she tells them. Then her expression twists, and she amends, “well, probably. The amount of energy it’s giving off, it _ought to_ explode, but Ciri’s taken the—well. The ‘tunnel of energy’, so to speak, and thrown it back on itself, so… it might not explode on _this side_ of the tunnel.”

“Don’t think too hard about it,” Ciri tells him, patting his shoulder consolingly. “Almost nothing about magic makes sense.”

“Oh, good,” Jaskier says, in lieu of demanding an explanation. “If we’re potentially all about to be blown up, shall we get going and get off the island, then?”

Ciri sits back, resting her head lazily against the wall, while Yennefer nods. She looks down each end of the corridor, before shrugging and eyeing the wall they’re leaning against.

“Stand back,” she commands; Jaskier groans, but hauls himself to his feet and drags himself to the opposite wall, Ciri just half a step behind.

Yennefer widens her stance and raises her hands, before the air around her crackles and she sends a barrage of magic at the smoothed stone, blasting a hole through the wall. On the other side of it is an enormous room with descending staircases on each side. Each of the doors to the room are made of heavy wood—ash, if Jaskier had to guess, as the room and the staircases seem untouched by the casual destruction the rest of Aretuza has been subjected to.

Yennefer steps through the hole first, as gracefully as though she were a court lady going for a stroll through the palace gardens; Ciri follows, having procured a knife from somewhere, brandishing it in front of her. Jaskier spares a moment to mourn the loss of his sword.

He follows the both of them through when it becomes apparent that there is nothing lurking just out of sight, ready to kill all of them.

* * *

Every scrape of their feet against the stone stairs; every hushed whisper to one another; every quiet gasp of air, seems thunderous to his ears. He feels twitchy and off-kilter and every step downwards feels treacherous; when the walls begin to shake, it takes him a moment to realise that it isn’t just his imagination.

“What’s—what’s happening?” he asks, the words piercing to his own hearing.

“I would imagine that that’s the portal, doing… something,” Yennefer answers tersely. “Mind your step, here; we’re at the bottom. We’re nearly out of Aretuza, now.”

True to her word, the bottom of the stairs leads to a corridor, which in turn leads to the first room he and Ciri entered in Aretuza, half-destroyed and such a welcome sight that Jaskier almost succumbs to the deluge of hysterical tears that have been brewing for some time now.

He doesn’t, of course. Instead he allows himself a single, quiet, “thank the gods,” (though he’s quite sure that the gods haven’t concerned themselves with the troubles of _this_ realm in _quite some time)._

Aretuza trembles again. Jaskier doesn’t pause to check that he’s being followed before he bolts out the door, cursing and squeezing his eyes tightly closed against the glare of the setting sun, blinding him completely.

On his left side, he hears a cacophony of noise: far below, the waves crash mightily on the shore; animals skitter nervously across the rocks before crawling into their burrows; the soft brush of feathers sliding against one another as birds take flight. He flinches away from the sound, tripping into Ciri, who he realises only after she steadies him with a concerned look, had been saying something to him.

He turns his head to look at her straight on. “Are you okay?” he hears her ask, but—it’s _wrong_ ; her voice is louder, more melodic and oddly changeable, in his left ear than his right.

“Uh… probably not,” he admits, “but we’re all about to die if we don’t get away from here, so maybe we should deal with it later.”

“If you’re sure,” Ciri says carefully, but she’s already pulling away and heading after Yennefer, down the path towards Garstang and Loxia.

Measuring each step with utmost concentration, he hurries after them as best he can, praying that he doesn’t skid and die on the scree.

* * *

Jaskier had assumed that, of all the things he and Ciri had set out to do on Thanedd Island, _running away_ would be the easy apart.

Apparently, this is not to be.

As they approach Garstang, they find that they have to take greater care to avoid the living rock that has moulded itself into perfect copies of the foliage.

The world has become an alien place.

If he weren’t already there, this is the point at which Jaskier would descend into hysteria.

He sees tumbling vines and young, twisting trees, built from stone and earth and studded with veins of clay and, oddly, glimmering quartz.

Tangled bushes and a riot of thistles and a carpet of fragile flowers, all built from stone, painted brown and grey and orange, shot through with pink and crystal white in places, spread down the mountainside.

 _I’ve gone mad_ , he thinks, except Yennefer and Ciri see the same thing as him, feel the same stone under their fingers, and shatter the flowers under their feet just as he does, so if he’s mad, then they’re mad with him.

The traverse the urban jungle in single file, Yennefer delegated to lead them and Ciri bringing up the rear. Jaskier does his best to follow Yennefer’s exact footsteps, and however much she disliked him before, whatever grudge she holds for his part in all of this—she does her damnedest to make sure that he survives, making a path for him where she and Cirilla could have just squeezed through, or vaulted over, and flattening the ground when the pressure in his head becomes intolerable, tripping him.

The way is treacherous and immeasurably different to how it had been coming up. Jaskier doesn’t think he would have even managed it, going the other way.

Twice, the rock-branches shift as Jaskier squirms beneath them, nearly pinning him, if he didn’t take pains to sacrifice half a sleeve of his jacket and the bottom hem of his shirt. It results in him shivering and gritting his teeth against the howling winds screaming up the mountain, the prickle of blood beading at his many scratches hot against his chilled skin.

A third time, it’s only Ciri’s witcher-reflexes and Jaskier’s innate sense for his own impending doom (not that he often heeds it) that saves him from being impaled. Instead, he escapes with a gouge carved out of his side, and a lot of blood, and a pissed-off Yennefer when she forces a potion down his throat and sets his side ablaze with some awful magic, knitting the skin back together.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” he curses, the breath hissing out between his teeth, while Ciri grips his shoulder and Yennefer kneels over him, her dark head bent over his stomach. “How did I survive fucking _Vilgefortz_ and then nearly get murdered by a _stone tree.”_

“Hush,” Yennefer scolds him. “You’re distracting me.” That’s sufficient to keep him quiet for several minutes, until Ciri apparently grows tired of the silence and the quiet sounds of Jaskier’s blood pouring from his side, and speaks.

“To be fair, Vilgefortz did nearly kill you,” she tells him, sounding distinctly unsympathetic. He scowls up at her.

“Yeah, well, then _I_ killed _him_ , so you can shut the fuck up.”

“And what are you going to do about the tree, then? Can’t kill rock.”

Jaskier bares his teeth in a grimace, suppressing the urge to writhe as his side itches madly, the new skin thin and sensitive yet. “I can knock it over.”

“Go on, then,” Ciri pushes. “Let’s see you try it.”

“Just you wait.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Yep.”

“Don’t believe me, huh?”

“Not on your—”

“ _Children_ ,” Yennefer hisses, rocking back on her haunches and pulling her hair out of her face, glaring viciously at them both. “If you two are done _bickering,_ we should get going before whatever is happening to the environment begins to happen to _us._ ”

That gets both of them scrambling to their feet, shaking off the tiny shoots of grass and ferns that had begun to wind themselves over their feet and up their ankles, blooming tiny, perfect flowers in more colours than Jaskier has ever seen together.

He stops, and surveys.

The scenery is so different to how it had been that it’s become unrecognisable. Even since they started down the path, it’s changed exponentially—before, it had been simply mud and rock and clay; now plant life grows into the cracks, alien and awful. Where before the ground had been bare, dotted only by misshapen boulders and even more misshapen trees, bent low by the wind, the scruff and shrubbery of the cliffs sparse and sickly, _life_ has now sprung up, in a thousand different shapes and a thousand different colours, alien and awful. Twisting, knobbed arches of rock and bark, braided together with silt and clay and countless flowers, curl overhead in unreal configurations that has Jaskier craning his neck and twisting around himself to follow all of the branches.

The ground beneath their feet _glows_ wherever they take a step. Small branches still sprouting from arches forming over their heads curl toward them, reaching for them, brushing against them as they walk by; Yennefer ignores them with glorious disinterest; Ciri eyes them warily; Jaskier reaches _back,_ brushing his fingers against the living rock, as they wave unsteadily in the breeze.

Garstang looms on their horizon, and Jaskier can see from here how greenery has overtaken it, with vines bursting through the rock to twine ever upwards. Ivy and leaves and what Jaskier can only assume is _grass_ (blades of grass that are _twenty feet tall_ ) have covered the entirety of the lower floor, and even now he watches the greenery stretch higher, curling through windows and over rooftops and entrenching there thoroughly enough that Jaskier can’t imagine ever seeing it as bare stone again.

“What’s causing this?” Ciri breathes, and Jaskier jumps at her voice. He’d forgotten she was even there.

“Ciri,” he says, “what the fuck do you _mean,_ what’s causing this? As if you don’t know?”

“Right,” she says, and then doesn’t add anything further.

“Can we go past it?” Jaskier finally asks, directing it as Yennefer, who casts him a tense look.

“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” she says, low.

“Can’t you just… open a portal? Get all of us off the island? Surely you’re not worried about the rest of the Fae,” Jaskier asks, hysteria colouring his voice.

“Look around us,” Yennefer scoffs. “You really want to step through any portal that I can summon here?”

“…you may have a point,” Jaskier allows.

“Shouldn’t we kill her?” Ciri asks suddenly; it takes Jaskier a moment to realise who she’s referring to, and jolts when he realises. That hadn’t even been a _consideration_ for him. “I mean, ideally?”

“Alright,” Jaskier says faintly, “ _you_ can do it.”

Yennefer scrubs a hand over her face and sighs deeply. “Ciri, darling, you forget that even an ordinary Fae is nigh impossible to kill, let alone what I am… admittedly _reluctant_ to call a Fae Queen, but still has to be improbably powerful for—all of _this_ to happen,” she informs them. “Besides—with what’s brewing in Tor Lara, the whole fucking Continent could crack in half, so we should _go_ and leave that bitch to deal with what _she created.”_

“Wow,” Jaskier says. “I hadn’t pegged you as vindictive.”

Ciri lets out an ugly snort, eliciting another disquieted sigh from Yennefer.

“If we and the queen survive this, we’ll come back for her,” she concedes, earning a wordless protest from Jaskier; he turns to shoot Ciri a betrayed look, who only sticks her tongue out at him in return.

At this display, Yennefer rolls her eyes, and huffs, “let’s just go.” With that, she turns to stalk in the direction of Garstang, delicately picking her way through the jungle of rock and silt that has sprung up around them.

* * *

Jaskier doesn’t think he breathes the entire time they’re passing Garstang. The closer they get, the harder it is for him to keep his eyes open, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. He can’t put it into words—it feels like his muscles are turning to lead, and his feet are trying to root themselves to the ground. It feels like his head is being filled with cotton.

Suddenly, Ciri is in front of him, saying… something; he doesn’t hear a thing. The source of the muffled static that pervades his hearing takes him a moment to pinpoint; he lifts a hand to his left ear and, cautiously, covers it—instantly, the hissing becomes quiet enough that he can ignore it.

“Ciri?” he gasps. His voice sounds quiet and shaky to him, but he doesn’t know how much of that can be attributed to the discrepancy between the current state of his hearing and its previous sharpened nature, and how much is due to him being terrified and exhausted and likely very close to just passing out.

“Jaskier! You’re—you need to just hang on to me, okay? I’ll lead you out,” she says breathlessly, reaching up to grip his shoulders tightly.

“I don’t want to die.” Somewhere between him thinking ‘okay’ and him _saying_ ‘okay’, several wires have crossed, and instead he manages to blurt out _that._

Ciri’s eyes soften, just barely. “Hold on to me,” she repeats, “no matter _what_ you see. And watch where you put your feet.”

Jaskier is _helpless._ He holds tight to Ciri’s hand and tucks his chin to his chest and, for the most part, concentrates solely on putting one foot in front of the other.

Once— _once_ —he feels something brush his cheek, before he hears an unintelligible whisper in his ear, and he looks up to see—

He comes to on the ground, Ciri and Yennefer both leaning over him. Ciri looks frightened and worried (and maybe a little bit exasperated); Yennefer looks bored, and pissed off.

“We told you _not to look,_ ” the sorceress hisses at him, obviously frustrated.

“Seriously, Jaskier,” Ciri huffs, “we’re gonna leave you behind at this rate.”

Jaskier presses his hand harder into his left ear, trying to relieve a little of the awful, throbbing ache that has concentrated there. “I prefer to think of myself as ‘comic relief’,” he informs them primly, “so you can’t leave me behind.” His tongue is thick and heavy in his mouth.

“Yes, you’re a joke. Now get up here,” Yennefer growls at him, getting swiftly to her feet and scanning their surroundings.

Jaskier accepts Ciri’s hand to help him up. “My dear Yennefer,” he says, “was that a _joke?_ Are we bonding? Is that what this is?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Jaskier counters. “You _like_ me.”

“I’m going to leave you here,” Yennefer deadpans.

The path they’re on is flat stone, and the grass to either side of it is thin and a dull, grey-green, and Garstang and its alien surroundings are far behind them.

“If you were, you’d have done it by now,” Jaskier grins smugly.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Okay. _Ciri_ won’t leave me behind.”

“Ciri will do _as she’s told.”_

“Oh? Oh, will you?” Jaskier whips around to address Ciri, who rolls her eyes and scowls half-heartedly at him.

“I’m not getting involved.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Jaskier complains, betrayed. “You wouldn’t leave me here.”

“Well—”

“ _Terrible!_ Both of you! You’re just awful to me. _Awful._ Just because I’m _human_ and don’t have magic and wasn’t raised by witchers—”

“Not all it’s cracked up to be,” Ciri mutters, mostly to herself.

“—doesn’t mean you two can _bully_ me!”

“Actually, it does,” Yennefer says. “Now hush.”

In the distance, Loxia has come in to view—grey and desolate—so Jaskier actually does shut his mouth, to save his energy for walking.

* * *

By the grace of all the gods that Jaskier doesn’t believe in, they encounter nothing, both in Loxia and on the bridge between Thanedd Island and Gors Velen. They sidestep the wards neatly, taking the exact path that Jaskier and Ciri had cleared earlier, Yennefer grimacing at some of his—ah, more _creative_ methods of drawing over the ancient sigils burnt into the grounds.

“This is…” Yennefer trails off, scowling at the ground.

“It’s a dick,” Jaskier supplies helpfully. “And it’s stopping you from being exsanguinated, so you be grateful to my dick.”

Yennefer’s lips twitch, just a bit. “Certainly the most useful thing your dick has ever done.”

Jaskier gapes. “How _dare—”_

“Guys,” Ciri says, pained. “Can we please stop discussing Jaskier’s dick.”

“Ugh,” he recoils. “Don’t say that, you’re sixteen.”

“You’re the one who _carved it into the ground.”_

“Because I’m twenty-two. It’s allowed. You’re just a baby.”

“I am _not—”_

“Children, please,” Yennefer commands, her lips still almost-but-not-quite-smiling. “Let us go.”

She sweeps over the phallus carved into the floor, and Jaskier and Ciri both mock-glare at each other behind Yennefer’s back, before Jaskier sticks his tongue out and follows, head held imperiously high. He hears Yennefer sigh and Ciri stifle a reluctant giggle.

* * *

Crossing the bridge is a much more hair-raising experience than Jaskier remembers. Granted, when he crossed it the first time, he hadn’t had much time to look down over the sides because he’d been sprinting away from the hunting cry of a Faerie, nestled deep withing Gors Velen—this time, he takes a moment to lean over the edge and stare into the black waters below.

“Remember your argument for taking the bridge was that we’d survive this drop?” Ciri nudges him, and he yelps and grabs the railing with a white-knuckled grip.

“ _What_ would you have done if I’d fallen over the edge just then?” he demands, whirling around to see her grinning unrepentantly. She shrugs.

“Laugh,” she says. “And then go fish you out. Cos, y’know, you’d _survive._ ”

He leans back over the edge. “Well, you never know,” he mutters, though—he’s glad that they didn’t have to test it.

They reach the edge of the bridge, completely unscathed, and… there’s nothing.

“Bit anticlimactic,” Jaskier stage-whispers, as they stare down the city gates. They came to a unanimous halt at the end of the bridge, because _Jaskier_ doesn’t want to go first, and Ciri and Yennefer both must have good reasons themselves for stopping, so now they’re all just… waiting.

“Jaskier, do not _fucking_ start,” Ciri admonishes him sharply. “If you saying that means that we all now die horrible, because you pissed off the wrong higher power, then I _swear_ I will do everything in my considerable power to ensure that you end up in some hell.”

Jaskier blinks at the uncharacteristically and exceedingly colourful threat. _Ciri’s probably just tired,_ he reasons. _And hungry._ With this as a consideration, he opens his mouth and says, without heat, “I’m shaking in my boots.”

“You really just have an astounding lack of survival instincts, don’t you,” Yennefer drawls, from Ciri’s other side.

“Y’know,” Jaskier frowns, “people keep saying that to me.”

“Oh, gods,” Ciri mutters. “Alright. Fuck it. I’m going.”

With that, she lifts her chin defiantly and strides past the both of them, towards the city gates that she and Jaskier had passed through, only—only _that morning,_ he realises.

He and Yennefer eye each other, and then he inclines his head towards the gates. “Ladies first.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely a gentleman,” she says, dry.

“I’m just exercising my survival instincts.”

Yennefer’s expression doesn’t so much as twitch. She just lets out a tiny, nearly-imperceptible sigh, before following Ciri into the city. Jaskier takes a moment to grin down at his feet, before following after them.

* * *

Gors Velen is no less a ghost town than it had been in the cool light of dawn, but, with the sun beginning its descent towards the horizon and the cobblestone streets gilded in sunlight (and, though he would not admit so even under pain of death, having Yennefer by their side helps too), the city seems much less frightening.

“Do you hear that?” Ciri murmurs to Yennefer, who has frozen in place like a hound, scenting out her prey.

“Voices,” Jaskier confirms grimly. He’d been trying to pretend that he was simply imagining things—the gods only know that he’s done enough of that today, and his hearing in his left ear has reached a not-unwelcome equilibrium where it’s noticeably better than it had been before all of this started, but not to the point where turning his head leaves him feeling sick and disoriented.

“Do we know what they’re saying? Or who they are, even?” Yennefer asks them both, frowning, yet sounding remarkably calm. Jaskier wonders for the first time just how old she truly is.

“No,” Ciri grimaces; Jaskier shakes his head in agreement, also unable to make out anything specific.

“Well,” Yennefer says, after a moment’s deliberation, “I haven’t heard any reports of the Fae holding _meetings._ ”

“First time for everything,” Jaskier points out. “Who knows what fucking with the portal has done to them?”

“The Fae draw their power from their connection to their world,” Yennefer says. “This isn’t actually the first time they’ve come through—”

“Look, normally? I could not be more thrilled that you want to regale us with a history lesson,” Jaskier interrupts her, “but now is _really not the time._ Just—do you think we’re about to meet somebody who wants to kill us all, or not?”

Yennefer purses her lips, her glare sharp enough to carve him into ribbons, before she clenches her jaw and relents. “I think Gors Velen emptied, after the initial breach,” she says softly. “I think for this many people to enter the city this quickly, they have to have portalled in.”

“Mages,” Ciri breathes.

“How many of th—you survived the initial attack?” Jaskier addresses Yennefer, who looks like she’s holding half a lemon in her mouth. Her eyes flick to him.

“Of those who were there? Not all. Those who _weren’t_ in Aretuza are likely fine. I didn’t see how many of those in the room managed to escape, but I know—not all of them. I was—” Yennefer breaks off, something pained and raw flashing across her face for just a moment, forcing Jaskier to look away.

He hadn’t known that Yennefer had been there. Or—he’d known, he just hadn’t _realised._ What it meant.

He wonders who she lost. If she even knows who she lost. He can’t imagine it. At least he’s seen his dead—seen their faces, laid their bones to rest as best they could, and raised markers for those whose bodies had been lost. At least he knows they’re at peace, now.

Jaskier doesn’t know everything about how the mages communicated over the last two years. He knows Triss Merigold spoke to Geralt, right at the very beginning. He knows Triss and Yennefer spoke, but not very often. He knows Yennefer visited Kaer Morhen once or twice. He knows that Yennefer doesn’t trust very easily, and he doesn’t know the reason but he thinks it probably has something to do with Yennefer’s pride, and her fear, and her unwavering scepticism in the notion that there are people out there who are on her side, wholly and completely.

Jaskier can admit it: he thinks he’s beginning to like Yennefer, a little bit.

“We should go to them,” Ciri says, in a tone of voice that brooks no argument. Jaskier is reminded that her grandmother, Queen Calanthe of Cintra, led soldiers into battle when she was younger than Ciri is now.

“And if we’re wrong? If we’re walking into a trap?”

“I think we’ve cheated death enough times today that we can count it as more than just coincidence, at this point,” Jaskier muses. “I mean, I’ll be the first to say fuck the gods—”

“Oh, dear Melitele,” Ciri mumbles under her breath.

“—but I in particular should have died about a hundred times today. In fact, I think it would be weirder if we _did_ die, now.” He grins at the filthy look that Yennefer shoots him, and offers, “I’ll go first.”

* * *

They don’t die. Jaskier wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re _not attacked,_ but they don’t die.

“Yennefer!” a female voice cries, and Jaskier blinks and steps out of the way just in time for a blur to crash straight into the sorceress at his side, Yennefer’s purple eyes flying wide as she suddenly finds her arms full of… somebody.

“Triss!” Ciri exclaims, grinning broadly. _That answers that, then._

Jaskier looks away from the reunion to scan the collected mages. They had previously been arguing about… something technical, decipherable from four streets away, and then had fallen silent when Jaskier, Ciri, and Yennefer had stepped into the plaza.

“What _happened?”_ Triss demands of them, drawing Jaskier’s attention back to the little trio of sorceresses. He turns to see her eyeing him with curiosity, and some trepidation. “Specifically, I meant in Aretuza, but—what happened to _him?”_


	16. Chapter 16

“Oh, I’m definitely going to die,” Jaskier says easily. “I saw the Faerie realm through the portal before Ciri blew it up. There’s no coming back from that.”

“You—” Triss looks horrified. Jaskier grins. “—before—” this time she looks over at Ciri, who looks sheepish.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Yennefer rolls her eyes and heaves a put-upon sigh. “Yes, there’s something going on with the human, although we’re not sure what it is just yet. And Ciri didn’t _blow up_ the portal,” she emphasises, shooting a filthy look at an unrepentant Jaskier, “she manipulated the flow of energy into reversing. Basically.”

“She blew it up, then,” translates Triss.

“Big time,” Jaskier says, smug. “So now we’re all probably about to be consumed in a ball of fiery death, if the Faeries don’t get to us first.”

“That’s not how exploding portals work,” Yennefer states, with an air of long suffering.

“Oh, and you’d know, would you?” Jaskier demands sceptically. “How many exploding portals have you—”

“The theory—”

“Is about as contrary as all magical theory gets, until it’s applied. Which it has never been,” Triss cuts in, grinning impishly at Yennefer.

“ _Betrayed,_ ” Yennefer gasps exaggeratedly. It’s a playful side to her that Jaskier has only seen the barest hints of, and he wonders just who this _Triss_ is to Yennefer, that she can reveal this side of her.

“I would never.” Triss grins at Ciri, who giggles, before addressing Yennefer again. “If the portal really is fucked, then the Fae’s magic will be fucked, too.”

Yennefer had already been frowning, but now he brows crease in thoughtfulness instead. “So…?”

“ _So,_ ” Triss enunciates, “their _magic_ is _failing…”_

Jaskier doesn’t get it. Ciri doesn’t seem to get it either.

Yennefer _does_ get it; her expression clears and for a moment she actually looks _pleased_ , before schooling her face back to neutrality. “Of course,” she says seriously. “Do you have—”

“Here,” Triss tosses her something small and unidentifiable she had procured from the folds of her dress. “Don’t antagonise them too much.”

“I’ll leave that to these two.” Yennefer tilts her head at Jaskier and Ciri.

“Do you know what’s going on?” he murmurs to Ciri.

“Uh, no,” she whispers back. “These two are just weird.”

Yennefer pays them no mind as she lifts her hands and shoots sparks from her fingers; before her, a portal bursts into view, crackling around the edges. She steps through without an ounce of trepidation and the portal snaps closed behind her, sending more sparks skittering across the stone floor before they dissipate to nothing.

“Now what?” Jaskier wonders into the silence.

“Now,” Triss grimaces, “myself and the other mages here are going to try and figure out what’s happening in Tor Lara, and if there’s anything we can do about it.”

“Sounds like fun,” Jaskier deadpans.

“I feel like everybody has just forgotten about the imminent threat of the Fae,” Ciri remarks. “We’ve fucked up their portal—”

“Language,” Triss reminds, and is soundly ignored by Ciri.

“—but we haven’t killed them all.”

“Without their connection to their homeworld, the Fae are nothing,” Triss explains. “They’ve come through before—one at a time, and never for very long. The energy on their side is too volatile to keep it open on _this_ side, without an anchor.”

“Vilgefortz,” Jaskier realises. “He was _literally_ their way in—they couldn’t have done it without him.” Suddenly and uncharacteristically, he’s absolutely furious. He’s _seething._ Everything—the last two years, the people he’s lost, all of the heartbreak and the devastation—

“Yes,” Triss agrees, her voice suddenly implacably hard, ice cold. “You can hate him, and what he did, for everything he’s taken from you—but we _knew_ him. He _betrayed_ us. And so many of us are dead because of it—because he was so fucking _stupid_ —” Triss had been getting steadily more furious, until she’d biting out every word with a wicked snarl and a feral glint to her eye, and now she cuts herself off and turns her head to the side, closing her eyes as if that will help.

Ciri steps forwards to take her arm. She doesn’t do anything overt, but Triss loosens from the tightly coiled ball of distress she’d wound herself into, instead letting her shoulders slum and her head drop.

“It’s alright,” Ciri murmurs. “It’s _alright_ to be angry.”

“I know that,” Triss answers, a little tearfully, her voice choked with rage. “But I was about to set something on fire.”

“Yeah, let’s not do that,” Jaskier cuts in, feeling that this is a safe moment to do so. “I don’t think it would be very good for my health.”

“Since when have you been concerned about your health, Songbird?” somebody behind him rumbles, and Jaskier momentarily freezes before whipping around, needing to confirm it with his own eyes.

“Geralt,” he breathes.

It takes him a second, because the glamour’s gone, but—those same golden eyes, that white hair, the way his whole face has lit up in a smile with his lips barely twitching… that’s definitely him.

Beside him, Ciri shrieks, “Geralt!” and dashes forward, leaping into him with all the exuberance of a sixteen-year-old and all the confidence of a daughter, that her father is undoubtedly going to catch her. She presses her face into his neck and Geralt winds his arms around her, holding her close, as he drops a kiss onto her head.

Jaskier grins broadly. Behind them, Eskel smirks at the display, and snickers when Geralt murmurs, “missed you,” loud enough for all of them to hear.

Yennefer shakes her hair out of her face and goes to stand by Triss; they share a smile that Jaskier has to look away from, before he catches Geralt and Eskel and Ciri and has to look away from that, too.

He looks around. Vesemir has also appeared, and gone to greet several mages who have engaged him in spirited discussion.

The plaza is surrounded on all sides by buildings. In the centre stands a parched fountain, dusty and overgrown with cheerful weeds. He wanders over to it, inspecting it with only the barest curiosity, before he sits with his back resting against the cold stone and tips his head upwards. It would be more poetic, he mourns, if the sun were still high enough in the sky to bear down on him; instead, he has to make do with a breeze that whistles over the rooftops, carrying the briny, slightly-rotting scent of the sea.

“You smell funny,” Eskel says, sitting down beside him.

Jaskier doesn’t open his eyes. “Wow,” he drawls. “Thanks.”

“I just mean—are you okay?” Eskel sounds _worried,_ and ordinarily Jaskier would be flattered, except this time Eskel has pretty much just confirmed what Jaskier already suspected: there’s something wrong with him.

“Probably not,” he answers honestly. “Aretuza is full of poisonous magical residue, or something, according to Ciri. And I’ve nearly died today more times than I can count. And I looked through the portal into the Fae’s world, right before Ciri blew it up.” He opens his eyes and tilts his head to give Eskel a lazy smile. “I’m only human.”

Eskel looks unspeakably sad and Jaskier has to tear his eyes away.

“It isn’t so bad,” he says after a moment. “I got to help with—with _this_. For however much it was worth, anyway,” he adds, thinking briefly about how many times today Ciri had to save him.

“She couldn’t have done it without you,” Eskel assures him, but it’s a cold comfort.

“She could have,” Jaskier says quietly. No matter what she said to him, before—he’s superfluous. Unneeded. Useful for five minute increments, useful so that she didn’t have to go alone, useful to relieve the tension and prevent it from spilling into the quality of her work—but he wasn’t _necessary._ Not in the way that he likes to be.

Eskel reaches over and grips his forearm. “What’s done is done,” the witcher says, gently. “And you helped.” He sounds, Jaskier thinks wryly, like he’s trying to convince them both.

“And I helped,” Jaskier repeats, but the words taste like ash in his mouth.

He closes his eyes again and tips his head back, and a moment later, Eskel goes, scraping a heel against the ground so Jaskier will hear him.

 _Why is it,_ he thinks sourly to himself, _that the person who’s dying has to comfort everybody else?_ He remembers, suddenly, his mother. Her passing. How in the days before, she’d been lost in her world, staunchly ignoring the reality of her situation—yet, for the few minutes in those weeks that she had been cognisant, it had been _her_ reassuring her children that everything was going to be okay.

It’s cruel. Jaskier wants to demand more, to scream and rage at the world that he’s only _twenty two,_ for fuck’s sake—he’s got so much more to give. So much more of the world that he wants to see. He’s not upset about dying—it’s for a good cause, after all; the best cause. He just doesn’t want to die unfulfilled.

He doesn’t want to die without first living.

He doesn’t want to die having spent the majority of his life in the one place he said he would never return to—Lettenhove.

Most of all, he doesn’t want to die without his family ever knowing what had happened to him. He should have told them—should have said something more than _what I’m doing is important._ Even if it made him sound like a madman—he could have died with his doubts laid to rest and his heart heavy but at ease.

Instead, he’s going to die surrounded by near strangers, in a dead city in a country overrun by monsters, and be buried in a shallow grave the same as every other young man who fought and died against something bigger than themselves.

Eskel leaves him to his thoughts, and then he’s alone, listening to the wind, to the low hum of the mages arguing back and forth about one thing or another. After a moment, he realises that he’s straining his ears for the silence that heralds a nearby Fae, and this annoys him so much that he opens his eyes again.

To see Geralt frowning down at him.

“I’m going to hang a bell on you,” Jaskier threatens, and pats the spot that Eskel just vacated to indicate that he can sit down.

“Yennefer’s been giving me that one for years,” Geralt says as he sits, stretching his legs out in front of him. He sits awkwardly, almost like he’s forgotten how to do it, and it’s then that Jaskier remembers that Geralt used to have a _tail._ He wonders how it must feel, to exist for something else entirely for two whole years, and then suddenly have that taken away again.

Then again, in the grand scheme of Geralt’s life, he supposes that two years is nothing.

“It’s good to see you,” he says quietly, conscious that the other witchers can probably hear every word he says.

Geralt doesn’t reply. Instead, he holds his hand out for Jaskier to take, and when Jaskier does Geralt draws it back into his lap and inspects it. His hands are rough with sword callouses and filthy with grime, and he smells like the forest and like nighttime.

“You’re dying,” Geralt says, after a pause.

Jaskier hesitates, then says, “yeah.”

Geralt squeezes his hand, and when Jaskier slides one eye open to peek over at him, Geralt is sitting with his head down, looking at their hands. He squeezes Geralt’s fingers. Comforting somebody who still has decades to live.

“Neither of us really expected me to survive,” Jaskier reminds him quietly. “And even if I did—you would have lost me eventually. I’m only human.”

Geralt hums, and for a moment, Jaskier accepts that this is all he’ll get, before Geralt speaks.

“We could have had decades.”

It’s quiet and sad and Jaskier unexpectedly finds himself blinking back tears. He hadn’t expected to cry for his own death. In an awful way, he’s not crying for himself—he’s crying for Geralt, for how much they could have loved each other if they only had time.

“How long do you think I have?” Jaskier asks him, and out the corner of his eye, he sees Eskel flinch at Vesemir’s shoulder, and the white-haired sorcerer they’re talking to look at the two witchers strangely.

“From what Yennefer told me… a month, maybe. If we found the right potions, maybe a year, but… it wouldn’t be kind.”

Jaskier nods. A month. It’s longer than he thought he’d have. “A month, then,” he decides. Geralt’s hand slides to encircle his wrist, pressing his fingers into Jaskier’s pulse point.

Geralt’s free hand comes up to cup Jaskier’s jaw, turning his head so that they’re face to face. Geralt has moved closer, turning so that his back is no longer pressed against the wall but rather so that they’re facing one another. This close, Jaskier can smell him: can smell the grass and the flowers and the early autumn air. He smells of their clearing, their Faerie Circle _._

“Geralt,” he breathes, and then Geralt leans in and presses their lips together and it’s—

\--it’s like coming home.

“I missed you,” Jaskier murmurs, when they’ve pulled away. Feeling Geralt’s lips smile against his own is a religious experience.

“I missed you, too,” Geralt answers, softer than Jaskier’s ever heard him.

“You just missed having someone bringing you wine,” Jaskier teases, lifting a hand to card through Geralt’s hair. It’s softer than he’d thought—some unattached part of him wonders briefly how Geralt managed to stay clean for so long, when another part of him, enraptured with having Geralt almost in his lap, hisses to _shut up_ , and that Jaskier doesn’t know where Geralt was when he wasn’t in the Faerie Ring. He resolves never to ask.

Geralt hums, and presses their lips together. Jaskier swipes his tongue against the seam of Geralt’s lips, eager to deepen the kiss, to taste more of him, and then Geralt’s tongue is pressing against his own, careful and gentle and hot enough that Jaskier can’t suppress his shiver.

Somebody coughs politely, and Jaskier draws away with regret, opening his eyes to see his frustration reflected back at him in Geralt’s golden eyes.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Eskel says, and to his credit he does sound genuinely remorseful, so Jaskier can’t snap at him too viciously.

“ _What_ ,” he demands, doing his best to convey just how much Eskel needs to _go away._

Eskel doesn’t look too concerned. “Do you hear that?” he asks instead, with no preamble, and Jaskier is about to demand what the fuck he’s going on about, when Geralt stills in his arms.

And then Jaskier has to pause, too, because he _can_ hear something.

“Fuck,” Geralt curses under his breath, while Jaskier cocks his head. It sounds like…

“Is that…?” he trails off, not wanting it to be true, even though every ambient sound for several miles around has silenced.

Geralt and Eskel look to him in shock. “You can hear that?”

“Is now really a good time for that question? Or do you maybe want to save it for when there _isn’t_ a horde of Fae about to run us down and eat us alive?”

“Right,” Eskel says after a moment. “Priorities. Geralt, will you—”

“Ciri and Jaskier,” Geralt confirms, in the tone of somebody who has just agreed to something, even though there was a whole conversation there that Jaskier apparently missed.

“What?” he demands, bristling when Eskel turns away and Geralt wordlessly gets to his feet, pulling Jaskier up after him. Ordinarily, the show of strength would leave him weak-kneed and panting, but he holds his ground indignantly. “ _Hey_ ,” he snaps, reaching up to poke Geralt in the chest. “Just because you and I are—are a _thing_ , does _not_ mean you—”

“Jaskier,” Geralt interrupts, his voice hard as stone. Jaskier swells with frustration. “When they come, you stay behind me.”

That isn’t what he’d expected, somehow. “What?”

Geralt grips his shoulders and holds his gaze unflinchingly. “The Fae are coming. We can’t run. Portals will only take us so far. With all of them together, _nowhere_ is safe. So we stand and we fight, here and now, and you’ll _stay behind me.”_

Jaskier’s mouth dries. At least Geralt can be succinct. He wants to argue, wants to insist that there _has_ to be another way, something else they can do—but now he can hear them climbing the walls of Gors Velen, thundering towards the city, sprinting through the streets, and there’s _no time—_

He crashes their lips together for what he knows is the last time, and it’s desperate and brutal and Jaskier feels hot tears slide down his face. _Goodbye,_ he doesn’t say.

Then they’re both running to the others, the mages already forming into battle lines, falling into position. Yennefer is there, grim and tense, her violet eyes flashing with unchecked fury that has Jaskier ducking away. Triss stands beside her, one hand tucked into Yennefer’s, and she looks frightened and ill and Jaskier mourns them both. _I wish I could have known you,_ he thinks of Yennefer but doesn’t say, and leaves it at that.

Geralt, Eskel, and Vesemir all unsheathe their swords, stepping forward and forming a loose line in front of the assembled mages. Ciri grabs Jaskier and pulls him so that they’re behind Geralt, standing amongst the first row of mages, and she keeps his hand in hers and holds his gaze with blazing eyes while offering him a knife.

There are no words. No last comforts, or prayers, or ill-timed jokes. There is only stiffened backs and fierce determination and, as the Fae pour into the plaza, alien and monstrous, with bared fangs and outstretched claws and their faces screwed up in the terrible concentration of the hunt, Jaskier feels his own terror leech away, feels a cold fury overtake him instead.

He just has time to think, _I should have had a month,_ and then he’s lifting his knife with a last, desperate yell.

It should have stopped there. _It should have stopped there._

Jaskier should have died, quickly and painfully, in the jaws of some faceless Faerie, with Geralt’s name on his lips and in his heart.

It all should have ended there.

It doesn’t.

What happens instead, is this:

An enraged battle cry rings out, the combined voices of a pack of mostly-humans screaming all of their fury and their terror and their determination not to die quietly.

A blast of magic, contributed to by many hands, amalgamating in a spectrum of colours, succeeds in throwing the first wave of Fae backward. The witchers leap forward, beating them further back, before retreating again to hold their line.

The second wave acknowledges their fallen brethren by leaping over their writhing bodies and are met by the sounds of dozens of weapons unsheathing.

The second wave utterly ignores these weapons. Utterly ignores the assembled fighters.

They weave through the throng of mages and witchers, pelting through the plaza with all the grace of a pack of wolves.

A third wave, then a fourth, then a fifth—so many Faeries that Jaskier loses count, dozens, _hundreds,_ more than he’d realised _existed._

 _How can anybody fight this?_ he thinks dazedly, watching them go by. Ciri has stepped closer to him, so he takes the hint and presses their shoulders together, her comforting warmth grounding him in the middle of all of this.

“Aretuza,” a sorceress says dully, when the last of the Fae have passed them by. “They’re headed for Aretuza.”

“Tissaia,” Yennefer murmurs, though her voice carries. “Are you sure?”

“Where else would they go?” Tissaia asks her simply. Jaskier remembers that name—remembers Ciri mentioning her, mentioning that she thought she was dead. Remembers how Vilgefortz had denied it. Without knowing her, he’s glad that she’s alive. She seemed… important to Ciri.

“How fucked are we?” Jaskier asks, drawing Yennefer’s attention away from Tissaia, who looks over at him with ill-concealed distaste (which, fair enough, but what _is_ it with all mages feeling superior to him?)

“Not sure, yet,” Yennefer tells him. “If they’re trying to fix the portal… maybe very. If this is just some instinct, if they’re truly just beasts at this point, then…” she trails off. _Then maybe we have a chance,_ nobody says.

“Can they do that? Fix the portal?” It’s Ciri who asks.

Yennefer looks frustrated. “I don’t _know,_ ” she insists.

For a moment there’s silence, and then behind them, Aretuza blows up.

Admittedly, Jaskier feels like they should have expected this.

The roar is loud enough that Jaskier drops to the ground on instinct, covering his head; next to him, Ciri does the same, and then Geralt leaps to cover them both, throwing his arms out to try to shield them. The ground is uncompromising beneath him and Geralt’s weight is by no means inconsiderable, so he spends the first few seconds laying on the ground just concentrating on breathing.

Half a minute ticks by, the ear-splitting thunder not ceasing while the fiery death that Jaskier had presumed would follow does _not_ , in fact, follow, and then he lifts his head to find some of the mages still dazed and on their feet, while others are lifting their heads from the ground and looking as confused as he.

“The island,” somebody says, which means Jaskier has to drag himself to his feet and look.

Thanedd Island, once towering above the sea, above Gors Velen, is now a plume of blackened ash that billows out, and presses against some invisible barrier that stretches along the circumference of the shore.

“What—what _is_ that? A barrier? I didn’t know Aretuza had a fucking _shield._ ” somebody—possibly Triss—asks dazedly.

 _How could you not know?_ Jaskier wants to ask, but his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth and his mouth is too dry to unstick it. Primal fear courses through him at the sight of the contained explosion.

“Whatever it is,” somebody else says grimly, “it’s older than any of us. Older than the Brotherhood, maybe.”

Jaskier doesn’t think his heart can take much more of this. All this adrenaline cannot be good for him.

“Great,” he says into the ensuing silence. “That’s just great.”

“Did that… kill? All of the Fae?” A sorcerer whispers to another standing next to him. Jaskier cocks his head, distantly aware of the witchers doing the same, and if he listens—

“Not all of the Fae were inside that circle, when Aretuza… exploded,” Jaskier says slowly. When he strains his hears, he can just hear the distant rumble of feet on stone—

“They’re coming back this way,” Vesemir says quietly, and the plaza stills as the implications hit them.

“ _Surely_ they’re weaker now, though,” Jaskier points out, when nobody says anything. Several dozen assembled mages and they’re all frozen like frightened rabbits, he notes bitterly.

“They’re confused,” Geralt notes, listening to something that even Jaskier’s improved hearing can’t catch. “Before, they were like… a herd. A pack. Running together. Now, they’re—”

“Disorganised,” Eskel fills in. “And afraid.”

“Easy pickings,” Vesemir grunts.

Jaskier snorts obnoxiously. “You think?”

“Uh,” Ciri interrupts, “they’d better be.” She has her head turns towards the entrance of a street that opens into the plaza. It’s empty.

“Ciri,” Geralt frowns, “what—”

“ _Hush_ ,” she insists, still staring, still with that lupine tilt to her head.

Several beats pass, and then Jaskier hears it too: a soft, creaking wail, echoing through the abandoned streets, and padding footsteps. Jaskier doesn’t know how she heard it before anybody else (or even _if_ she heard it before anybody else, or just sensed it, in that strange way of hers), but he can tell by the discomfited shifting among their ranks that even the mages can hear it, now.

“It’s coming this way,” he notes, without inflection.

“Why aren’t we running?” a mage asks, When Jaskier glances over at him, he sees a man who looks no older than himself (though he’s away that physical appearance is by no means indicative of actual age), shifting nervously, a hand fluttering over the handle of a jewelled dagger sheathed at his hip. To be fair, it’s the kind of question that Jaskier would ask, if he hadn’t already accepted that he was going to die.

“Run _where?_ ” Ciri scoffs. Jaskier wants to say something, but decides that he doesn’t actually feel bad for the mage.

There’s a quiet snarl, and Jaskier looks up to see the Faerie standing uncertainly in the street, fangs bared. It takes a step towards them, muscles rippling as legs that twist like a cripple’s work by some fell magic to keep it upright, to give it impossible speed and strength. It hesitates, and leans back on its haunches, flitting its gaze across the crowd of assembled mages and witchers—and, if Jaskier were to consider its expression as _human,_ it almost seems to consider retreating.

Then it steps forward again, its skin stretching and tearing across muscles that shift and rearrange to allow the creature to fall forward onto its arms, its bones grinding as it takes another step, this time using all four legs to carry itself. It looses a low warning growl.

Watching it, Jaskier wants to be sick.

“Do you want to take this one, or should I?” Eskel asks Geralt. It takes Jaskier a moment to place the note in his voice, and frowns when he realises Eskel sounds _resigned._

“You think I’d let you have the bragging rights?” Geralt answers, quirking his lips. “Come on, brother. We may as well do this together.”

“Don’t sound too excited,” Eskel mutters, but Geralt is already jogging forward, swallowing a potion, sword raised to meet the Fae’s outstretched talons.

The fight is by no means clean—but it’s swift.

The Faerie’s head presents a horribly macabre picture as it rolls garishly across the floor. Its lips are sill pulled back, frozen in a silent roar. The body wobbles, still standing, with Geralt looking dubiously at it from one side and Eskel with his sword still raised on the other, ready to run it through again with his sword if it looks to attack again, even without its head.

Slowly, gracelessly, the body begins to fall. Like the felling of an ancient sentinel tree, it crashes to the ground, its bones crunching on impact with a sickening sound and its skin tearing further, like wet paper, blood spilling across the ground. One of its legs twitches a final time, then stills.

After a brief moment of stunned silence, the body begins to tremble; it begins with the extremities, the skin turning grey and wrinkled, before sloughing off entirely and turning to a fine, ash-like dust, scattering across the ground. With the skin gone, the veins and arteries and muscles are revealed beneath; there is not an ounce of fat anywhere to be seen, and all the other internal process of the creature are blackened and deformed and unlike anything Jaskier has ever had the misfortune of seeing.

Muscles peel away and dissolve to reveal white bone, cracking and splintering apart, that dissolves into its own grey ash within seconds of exposure to the air. Jaskier swallows back vomit.

The process takes several minutes, finishing with the decapitated head.

A beat.

“That’s why we don’t have any records of studies on dead specimens,” a mage points out, hushed, sounding _awed._

Beside him, Ciri wrinkles her nose. “Gross,” she declares.

“Not pleasant,” Jaskier agrees faintly.

“It’s that easy,” Vesemir says quietly. “ _That easy._ To kill one of them. A fucking human could do it.”

Jaskier considers this, and then says, a smile tugging at his lips, “can you imagine what that person’s reaction is going to be? When in their final act of defiance, they swing their sword at a Fae and manage to actually _do something_ with it? What the hell would they think?” Vesemir looks unimpressed, but Ciri snickers, so Jaskier counts it a success.

“We have to get the word out,” Yennefer says slowly. “This is—this could be _it.”_

And all of a sudden, Jaskier sees the future, bright and clear: humans and witches and elves and dwarves, side by side, beating back the Fae with bloodied determination cultivated over the last two years of slaughter. Fighting them, reclaiming their land, reclaiming their _lives,_ and _winning._

Lettenhove—his family and his friends—no longer bound and terrified, but _free._ Communities reaching out to one another again, able to work and trade.

Oxenfurt, filled with music again.

Lambert, free from his own Ring, no longer alone after two entire years of solitude.

Children, shrieking and playing in the streets (no more little white headstones, marking bodies that couldn’t be buried because they’d been stolen or eaten).

…Jaskier won’t be here to see it.

The familiar frustration rises up in him, so quickly he chokes on it, and he thinks for a moment of vomiting before deciding that he won’t do that in front of all these strangers. Instead he forces it back, as well as the tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, and decides to count himself lucky that he got to see any of this at all.

He hears Geralt coming, so he doesn’t startle when the witcher arrives at his left, standing in his space. Jaskier does shiver, slightly, when Geralt reaches out to wrap his fingers around Jaskier’s wrist.

“What are you thinking about?” Geralt asks.

Jaskier turns to him, this man that he could have loved. He has tears in his eyes. He smiles brightly, and says, “I’m happy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys i was SO tempted to leave it here but. i did write an epilogue. however depending on how much you like angst you can totally choose to just stop reading here lol


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to everybody who read this before with the unedited version of chapter 17: it has been fixed! This is the final version! Hope you enjoy it more lmao

It shouldn’t have happened.

In the moments before his death, Jaskier thinks, _gods-be-fucking-damned, not again._

He’d like to say that the last thing on mind before he dies was a little more dignified, but truth be told, being tackled into a river by a Faerie while he’s taking a piss isn’t a very dignified death anyway, so he supposes it doesn’t particularly matter. And besides—it isn’t like anybody is ever going to know.

It happens like this: he and Ciri go to retrieve their horses, and find them in the paddock they left them in grazing side by side like old friends. Jaskier professes the need to urinate. Ciri scowls at him and sends him away to do his business in the woods.

A small river, unmarked on any of the maps, is nearby, and Jaskier heads towards it with the idea that he might try to wash some of the blood off of him.

Standing against the tree, the roar of the river in his ears, Jaskier doesn’t hear the forest go quiet.

His thoughts are disordered and a thousand miles away, so he doesn’t take note of the familiar prickle that means he’s being watched.

In half a heartbeat, a _thing_ leaps from the trees, a terrifyingly beautiful face contorting into a snarl as it bears him down. Jaskier hears the thunder of the river an instant before he hits the surface, like slamming into rock, freezing and unrelenting as he’s borne down to the riverbed. Sharp stones slice into his back and he hits his head hard off the floor.

For an instant, he loses consciousness, and when he awakes it’s to the impression that his chest is being torn open.

Then he glances down, and sees the Faerie wrist-deep in his ribs.

Jaskier heaves in as much water as he can, his lungs already burning, and thinks, _gods-be-fucking-damned, not again,_ and promptly passes out.

* * *

When he awakes, he’s face down in the sand, and he feels like he’s been set alight. He manages to turn his face to the side just in time to vomit up an ocean of vile-tasting river water. His body heaves, jerks, and then heaves again, his stomach cramping, and when his stomach revolts and he inevitable vomits again, all that comes up is blood and bile.

“You should be dead,” he hears, and he groans faintly in answer. It’s all he can manage.

Somebody kneels beside him on the sand, then there are hands on him, turning him over, and the bright glare of the sun sends him pressing his face back into the sand and all of the refuse he’s just ejected.

Somebody tuts, and cups a hand under his cheek, forcing him to look up. He blinks blearily into the dark eyes of an elf.

“Guh,” Jaskier manages.

“Jaskier,” he hears somebody whisper, and it takes him a moment to connect the noise to Ciri. He wants to turn his head, to reassure her that he’s alright, but… he _can’t_ turn his head, and he isn’t actually convinced that he’s alright.

“Your wounds,” the elf says to him. “They—they’re healed. I watched that Faerie tear you open like it was nothing, like your skin had turned to paper, and you swallowed water and you should have drowned. There should be a huge hole in your chest. You should be _dead._ ”

“Heh,” Jaskier says, and spits out another glob of blood. “You—we—where are we?” His voice is hoarse and breathing hurts like a motherfucker, so Jaskier sticks with shallow breaths and runs his tongue over his teeth, tasting acrid bile and blood.

“Not far,” Ciri answers. Her voice sounds wet, like she’s been crying. “We—I went after the Faerie, and Dara pulled you from the water.”

It takes a moment for Jaskier to connect the name ‘Dara’ to this elf, wondering briefly when the two of them had time to introduce themselves while he _died,_ and when he does, Jaskier blinks up at him again, inspecting his face for any indication of ill intent. He sees nothing, but then, he was just torn open and then drowned, so—

“What—what happened?” he asks, his throat mangling the words so badly that it’s a wonder Ciri understands him at all. He rolls over a little and twists his neck so he can see her, and she looks miserable.

“You—I heard something crash into the river, so I came to look. It was—I saw you _die._ Or I thought I did. I saw the Faerie tear you open and I watched you go limp. I jumped in, too, with my knife, and—the Faerie’s dead, by the way,” she informs him, and Jaskier nods. “While I was dealing with it, Dara pulled you onto the shore.”

“It seems I owe you, then,” Jaskier says quietly to the elf, who shakes his head vehemently.

“Just never make me do that again, and I’ll call it even.” The elf hesitates, and then says, “I should go.”

“Oh, but—” Ciri exclaims, and then flushes when Dara and Jaskier both look at her. “Just… it’s a bit soon. I was hoping… we could talk.”

“I need to get back to my family,” Dara says carefully. “And besides, somebody’s coming.”

Jaskier’s ears are filled with water, so he can’t tell, but a look of concentration crosses Ciri’s face and she tilts her head, listening. Jaskier lets his head thump back into the sand, and closes his eyes, trying to control his breathing.

“I should be dead,” he murmurs. “Why am I not dead?”

“What happened?” he hears somebody ask distantly, hears the forest swallow somebody into its shadows, hears the tremendous power of the river. He hears the blood pumping in his veins, the relentless beating of his heart. He hears the wind in the trees and the breaths of the others in the clearing. Somewhere to the east, a deer treads silent footsteps through the foliage.

“—ou hear me? Jaskier?”

He opens his eyes and blinks up at the person crouched over him.

Geralt.

Of course.

“’ralt?” he murmurs, the first half of the word eaten by the scratchiness of his throat. “You’re—I should be dead.”

Geralt hums. “I sent you off to get _your horse_ ,” he says then. “You managed to cross the Continent, _twice_ , murder a mad sorcerer, and face off against a pack of Fae, and then you nearly die while fetching your horse from the paddock.”

“I did die,” Jaskier corrects. “I felt—it. Felt it go. Then it just… came back.” He’s aware that he’s not making a lot of sense, but honestly, what had happened hadn’t made a lot of sense, so he’s not sure how much you can expect from him.

“Okay,” Geralt says softly. He murmurs something to Ciri that blends in with the whisper of the wind through the forest, so Jaskier doesn’t bother trying to parse what he says, and then there are arms under his legs and his shoulders and he’s being lifted, and he’s _safe,_ so when the darkness comes for him again he slips into it willingly.

* * *

The second time Jaskier dies, it’s from friendly fire.

He’s on a battlefield, slipping through the mud and blood that autumn storms have churned into the earth, making the ground treacherous, and there’s a crush of people around him as they fall back from the Fae’s latest advance.

The monsters across the battlefield are a horrifying amalgamation of twisted limbs and gaping maws and ethereally stunning faces, graceful forms, teeth long and sharp enough to snap a man’s arm clean in two and bright, clever eyes. Every time Jaskier tries to focus on one, tries to pick out its features from the throng of other Fae around it, his eyes begin to slide out of focus and the beautiful Faerie he had been looking at suddenly becomes one from his worst nightmare, misshapen and grotesque.

The humans behind him rally, lifting their swords, and then the call for archers goes up, and a hundred yards behind them he hears the orders go out.

He wipes the blades of his swords against his breeches. Somewhere in the scrum is Geralt, likely with Ciri, and he knows some of the mages have taken the far ends of the field, to hold the line so the Fae can’t slip around them.

The orders to _loose!_ echo across the field, and Jaskier hears the twang of several hundred bowstrings and the whistle as they soar through the air, hears the flame-tipped ones roaring overhead, watching the Fae eye the oncoming attack dubiously.

He’s so focused on watching to see if the Faeries fall that he doesn’t notice several men around him suddenly being knocked to the ground. He doesn’t notice the arrows sticking out of their necks, like so many quills of a porcupine. He doesn’t notice the air shifting, nor does he notice the arrow that comes diving for him.

It hits the back of his head and slices clean through his eye before he even gets to realise what has happened.

This time when he dies, he thinks nothing at all.

* * *

He wakes up face down in the mud, surrounded by a hundred other corpses.

 _Fuck’s sake_ , he grits to himself, and hauls the suddenly-momentous weight of his body upwards, getting to his knees with his hands braced in front of him. He still can’t see out of his right eye, and when he gropes blindly for it, feels— _something._

He tugs, and can hear the wood grinding against the bone as he pulls the arrow out of his face. Blood spatters to the ground, and the feeling of pulling fletching out of his eye causes him to pass out again, this time gladly.

* * *

“Fuck,” he groans, when he attains consciousness the next time.

The sky above is a bruised purple, darkening into violet into the blue that you only see at nighttime—so blue that it’s nearly black. He stares up at the sky for several moments, trying to get his bearings, before he braces himself and pushes himself up onto his elbows, tilting his head so he can inspect the battlefield.

Bodies, everywhere—covered in a thick layer of ash, the dust that the Fae turn to when they die, and a lot of it has mixed into the mud and become a stubborn coating of slime. It oozes, and Jaskier stares, fascinated, at a glob of it dripping from the mangled remains of what he thinks used to be a hand, unattached from the rest of the arm, looking like the trail of a slug as it slides to the floor.

Getting to his feet is a feat he doesn’t particularly feel like accomplishing, but he listens to the wind carrying the groans of a hundred dying men, and decides that he’d rather force himself to his feet than lay here among corpses.

His joints creak uncomfortable as he pulls himself upwards, and he still hasn’t blinked open his right eye, crusted shut as it is with dried blood and mud and possibly the mud-Faerie ash-slime concoction that appears to have covered the battlefield. His swords are gone— _again_ —and his mouth tastes like death, and he’s a little disgruntled at the fact that nobody has come looking for him yet.

He makes his way back to where they had set up their camp, grumbling to himself all the while, and finds Eskel sharpening his swords outside the entrance to the command tent. The witcher fixes him with a steely gaze, and says, “you get killed again?”

“Got shot,” Jaskier grunts. “Thanks for coming to find me.”

Eskel shrugs. “You mad about it?”

Jaskier thinks about it, and realises—no, he’s not, really. He’s a corpse that picks itself up off the battlefield and walks home, afterwards. How can he expect monster killers to be comfortable with that?

“Nah,” he says, pasting on a grin. He pauses, then nods at the tent, and asks, “they in there?”

Eskel hums concomitantly, and draws the whetstone down the edge of his sword again, careful and precise. Jaskier leaves him there to push between the tent flaps, finding Geralt, Yennefer, Vesemir and Ciri all hunched over a map drawn across a table in the centre of the room.

Yennefer and Vesemir’s expressions both tighten when they spot him, but Ciri grins brightly and Geralt softens, leaving the map behind to go to him.

“You’re alright?” he murmurs against Jaskier’s lips, fitting his hands easily around his hips. Jaskier smiles against Geralt’s mouth.

“Not dead,” he replies. “Or—ex-dead, I guess.”

Geralt pulls away and frowns. “You died?”

Jaskier hums. “An arrow. From one of ours.”

Geralt brings a hand up to Jaskier’s face and swipes at the blood crusting under his eye, then curls his fingers to rub soothingly against his cheekbone. Jaskier lets his eye flutter closed and presses his cheek further into Geralt’s palm, calmed by the witcher’s steady presence.

“We’ll figure it out,” Geralt murmurs to him. “Somebody should have been there today. I was—I thought you were—”

“Hey,” Jaskier interrupts quietly. “It’s—this is war. It’s alright. I haven’t… died… since that first time, but I’ve been incapacitated enough times since then that it’d be ridiculous for you all to keep running around after me.” Geralt frowns at this, so Jaskier lifts a hand to card through Geralt’s hair, scratching his nails lightly across his scalp. Geralt’s eyes flutter shut, and he lets out a breath.

“Maybe we can make a rota.” There’s a quirk to his lips that means he’s not serious, and Jaskier grins back.

“Find the zombie?”

Geralt hums. “We could have wagers.”

“I think if you’re having wagers on finding my corpse then I ought to get something out of it.”

“Why? You’d just be lying there.”

Jaskier rolls his eyes. “That’s the hardest part.”

Geralt leans forward and kisses him again, and Jaskier’s frown eases. “We shouldn’t be joking about this.”

“I’m adjusting,” Jaskier argues. “It’s a process.”

“Boys,” Yennefer says from behind them, “if you’re going to continue climbing all over each other, you may go.”

“Oh, I may, may I?” Jaskier asks her, drawing regretfully away from Geralt and turning to appraise her just in time to catch her rolling her eyes at them.

“We need to talk about the mountains,” Vesemir informs them, gesturing widely at the map, and Jaskier groans.

“Well, they’re very low down on my list of places that I’d like to revisit,” he quips, but he grabs Geralt’s hand and tugs him over to the war table.

In the war planning, Jaskier can forget that he’s died a second time.

* * *

The third time Jaskier dies, he saves Lambert.

He doesn’t remember what the witcher was saying before; he just remembers seeing a glint of sunlight off bared fangs, and leaping forward to knock Lambert to the ground. He remembers staring, wide-eyed, into Lambert’s stunned face. He remembers the feeling of Faerie talons cutting into him, getting a grip between his ribs, and then being yanked upwards—the feeling of his bones splintering under the force of it I the last thing he remembers before he loses consciousness.

This time when Jaskier awakes, it’s to the disconcerting sensation of his skin knitting itself back together. His head is resting in somebody’s lap—Geralt’s, he assumes, from the way they’re carding their fingers through his hair—and he’s laid on his side, his tunic cut away, his back bared and burning as whatever damage the Faerie did to him finishes healing.

“Mgh,” he grunts, and the hands pause for a moment before continuing to pet his head.”

“Jaskier,” Geralt rumbles above him, and Jaskier tilts his head and presses his forehead into Geralt’s thigh.

“…Hi,” he murmurs, feeling inexplicably tired. Healing takes a lot out of you.

“Yennefer’s going to take a look at you,” Geralt tells him without preamble. “What that Faerie did—Lambert was about to die, and we’ve only just got him back—and you _saved him,_ and I watched you die—”

“Geralt,” Jaskier grumbles into the scratchy, blood-soaked fabric of Geralt’s leather pants. “I understand you’re freaked out, but I have got a _killer headache.”_

Geralt hums. They sit there in silence for several moments, and then Jaskier turns his head so he can peer up at Geralt out the corner of his eye. That golden gaze meets his, warm yet worried, and all Jaskier wants to do is close his eyes and sleep and pretend that none of this is happening to him—but he can’t.

“What’s happening?” he dares to ask, after a moment of deliberation.

“We killed the Fae,” Geralt tells him. “Lambert’s off taking his woes out on a tree. Yennefer is… gone.”

Jaskier grumbles something incoherent, then forces himself to sit up, feeling the stretch and pull of new skin as he flexes. His shirt, he sees, is a lost cause—a pile of bloody ribbons, slowly soaking up the mud, and the sky is much darker than it had been when the Fae surprised them, scouting out the foothills of the Blue Mountains, half a week away from Kaer Morhen.

“Is he alright?” Jaskier asks Geralt, low, unsure as to whether Lambert can hear him. The other witcher has been… fragile, to say the least, since they liberated him from his Faerie Ring; Jaskier’s worried about him adjusting to living again amongst other people.

“He’ll be alright,” Geralt reassures him. “Just pissed off about the Fae. He’s not… he isn’t in any danger.”

Jaskier nods, understanding the meaning behind Geralt’s words, and glad of it. For two years, the peoples of the Continent had been splintered into tiny fractions, fighting to survive each day—and now communications have been re-established and the world is a lot bigger than it was and adjusting to this new reality is going to take some time.

The by-now-familiar sound of a portal flickering into existence has Jaskier pricking his ears, lifting his head to look, though when he sees Yennefer’s borderline-murderous scowl, he wishes he hadn’t bothered. He heaves himself so he’s sitting cross-legged, opposite Geralt, and slowly leans forward until he’s resting his forehead against Geralt’s sternum. The witcher rests a hand against the back of his neck.

“Jaskier,” he hears, in Yennefer’s unsympathetic tone. “Jaskier, get up. We need to figure out what’s going on with you.”

He groans. “Can we not just… leave it be?” he asks, still not lifting his head from Geralt’s chest. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

“You’ve died _three times_ ,” Yennefer hisses at him. “With what happened to you in Tor Lara, you should have been dead after a month. It’s been three. _Something_ has gone fundamentally wrong, somewhere, and we need to find out what it is before it progresses.”

Jaskier stays silent, leaning into Geralt, absorbing as much comfort as he can from that hand resting on his neck and the slow thump of the witcher’s heart beating in his chest, before he draws back to look at Yennefer.

Her eyes soften, minutely, and he closes his before bracing himself. In front of him, Geralt hauls himself to his feet, and then reaches down a hand in silent offer. Jaskier takes it gratefully.

Once standing, he wobbles, but doesn’t fall, and Yennefer doesn’t wait to watch if he’s following before she turns and sweeps through the portal.

Taking Geralt’s hand in his, Jaskier follows.

* * *

“This is not what I thought you meant by _experiments_ ,” Jaskier hisses through his teeth, staring down at the bloodied stump on his hand where his ring finger ought to be. Blood sprays from the end and he bites back a whine, wondering if passing out would convince them to give him a _break_.

“Hush,” Yennefer says briskly. “Now—oh, _fuck_.”

“What?” Jaskier demands, “that doesn’t sound—”

His finger.

Has _melted._

Like when the Fae die; the skin bubbles and wrinkles and sloughs away, turning to dust where it falls off completely, and then the revealed bones and tendons go the same way, until there’s nothing but a small pile of grey ash on the table where Jaskier’s finger ought to be.

He and Yennefer both stare at it in shock.

His hand itches.

He doesn’t want to look down, but he does—to see the blood stop pumping from his hand, and then with a sickening grind, he feels and hears and sees another finger growing in place.

Jaskier closes his eyes and falls forward, off of the bench, and is unconscious before he hits the floor.

* * *

When he wakes up, his head is resting in Geralt’s lap again, and this time he’s been given a blanket.

Yennefer is saying… something, and there’s a hitch in her breath when he wakes up, so he thinks they know that he’s awake, but he doesn’t make any effort towards getting up and neither does he try to listen to the conversation overhead.

He doesn’t know how long he lays there for, eyes closed, head pillowed on Geralt’s thigh with the witcher’s hand stroking his hair, and he drifts in and out of sleep a little until Geralt cups his face and rubs a thumb down his cheek.

“Songbird, hey,” he murmurs, “you need to get up. C’mon.”

Jaskier grumbles unintelligibly, but does as he’s told, sitting up so he can rest his head briefly against Geralt’s shoulder, his eyes still stubbornly shut. He takes several breaths before opening his eyes fully, meeting the gazes of everybody in the room.

There’s Yennefer, and Triss, and Vesemir and Eskel and Lambert, and a few other mages that he doesn’t recognise—Tissaia is one of them, but she has her back to him, poring over something laid out on the table with another mage at her side.

“You’re not going to chop off anything else, are you,” he asks wearily, reaching up with his hands to scrub at his eyes. He tries not to think about the regenerated finger.

“No,” Eskel says, shooting a dark look at Yennefer who looks only mildly repentant. “No more experiments like that.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Jaskier rolls his eyes. “I knew what she was going to do.”

“You _passed out.”_

“I do that all the time; it’s not special.”

“Boys,” Yennefer sighs, “please. Just—it confirmed something for me, and what we’ve found, Jaskier, is that you’re _functionally_ immortal. However long these regenerative abilities will last, I have no idea—if they’ll naturally wane as you grow older, or if you’ll be this young forever—but we’ll have to wait and see if you age, and that will give us an idea.”

Jaskier… _hears_ the words that she’s saying, but his brain is stuck on ‘immortal’ and he’s not sure what to do with it. His lips shape the word, but it isn’t really clicking for him.

“I’ll tell him the rest,” Geralt says quietly, rubbing a hand across Jaskier’s lower back, and he coughs out a startled little laugh.

“There’s _more?”_ he demands. “Wait—what am I saying, of course there is. There _always_ is.”

“Catch you later, buttercup,” Eskel tells him, taking Lambert by the wrist and dragging him out of the room. The mages follow, Triss pausing to send him a shaky smile, and then Jaskier and Geralt are alone in the room.

“What is it,” he asks quietly.

Geralt sighs. “Yennefer thinks—she’s of the opinion that all of the Faerie magic, the portal, and what you experienced on the path outside Garstang, the magics of the Fae Queen… she thinks that it… changed you.”

Jaskier frowns. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s—isn’t that what she just told me?”

Geralt pauses his petting of Jaskier’s back, his hand heavy and firm where it rests against him, and then says, “she thinks… you’re no longer as _human_ as you were.”

Shit.

_Shit._

“What—what am I, then?” he asks, rising hysteria causing his throat to tighten and the words to come out slightly strangled.

“With the regenerative ability… perhaps part Fae. Perhaps something different. It might just be a mutation—like me—but the… similarities she found between… well, you and the Fae—”

“Fuck,” Jaskier hisses. “ _Fuck._ So—what? What’s going to happen?”

Geralt seems to understand his concern, because he reaches to cup Jaskier’s face and force him to look into Geralt’s eyes, calm and unflinching. Jaskier shakes in his grip.

“Nothing,” Geralt swears. “Not yet. Hopefully not ever. You—you’ll stay with me, we’ll _fix_ this. You’re going to be fine.”

Jaskier huffs out a derisive laugh. “You can’t know that.”

There’s silence, because he knows that Geralt won’t outright lie to him.

“It’s going to be alright,” Geralt murmurs eventually, and Jaskier wants to argue, but he’s exhausted and shaky, and he only leans his head against Geralt’s shoulder, wanting to forget.

* * *

Jaskier’s troubles aside, the Continent begins to heal. The pushback against the Fae goes successfully, for the most part; the mages dig out human kings and courtiers, their generals, and their soldiers. They form battalions, and armies, and make a concerted effort to eradicate what remains of the Fae.

They’re joined by elves, and dwarves, and quietly they are helped by the monsters who live in the darkest corners of the world, crawling out of their dens after being chased in there by the insurmountable might of the Fae.

Jaskier fights, alongside Geralt and Ciri and sometimes Eskel and Lambert; sometimes he fights amongst the bands of humans; once, he offers himself as bait to a band of Faeries hiding too deep in a system of caves for the humans not to suffer heavy losses against if they attempt to follow after them, and he experiences being ripped apart by a dozen starving Faeries and is unconscious for an entire week as his body slowly knits itself back together from the scraps that had been left.

As cities begin to bustle and trade re-establishes, the Northern Countries send a joint delegation to Nilfgaard, intending to route out Emhyr var Emreis and find out just how much of a hand he had in the invasion, and the ensuing destruction of the Continent. They mean to hold him accountable, though Jaskier can’t imagine how well it’s going to go for them.

They begin to put farmers back into the fields, the great herds of cattle once again beginning to replenish. Fields of grain and corn that had rotted are cleared of rocks and debris, are resown, and the next autumn are harvested again to the great enthusiasm of all the people who spent the last three years dancing somewhere along the edge of starvation.

They begin to rebuild homes and taverns and schools, libraries and bathhouses, prisons and markets. People go back to work. There are fewer people by far than Before—those that are left erect monuments to everybody they lost, and vow that such an apocalypse would not be allowed to happen again.

Mages travel to every court on the Continent to lay spells and runes and failsafes against fell magics. Jaskier doesn’t believe it will be enough, but he isn’t an expert in these things.

Aretuza is declared lost. The remaining mages—the sorceresses, mostly—begin to look for other options for a school.

The witchers are in high demand, and Jaskier thinks they might build another school—but they don’t. He once asks Geralt why, lying side by side in bed together, and Geralt’s voice is hard and unable to be argued with when he says, “because seven boys in ten died in the Trials, and even fewer made it past the first year on the Path.” Jaskier hadn’t known that. He presses his fingers into Geralt’s skin and offers him what comfort he can.

* * *

Jaskier had meant to return to his family in the month he had remaining. Then he died, and continued to die, and then he found himself in the fighting against the Fae—

It takes him two years to return to Lettenhove.

The road is just as he remembers, though for the first time in four and a half years, he finds the fields on either side of it populated with animals, and in the distant he sees rows and rows of crops.

Pegasus dances beneath him—perhaps, Jaskier thinks wishfully, he remembers his home—but Roach is as uninterested as she always is, Geralt atop her in the armour of a witcher, his two swords slung across his back. Jaskier can’t imagine ever looking at him and _not_ seeing a witcher.

Strange, how things change.

They approach Lettenhove, and though it isn’t in sight, Jaskier feels the presence of the grand tree where his mother is buried, where they laid to rest some of Juliusz’ things, though they never had his body. The manor is larger than he remembers—he spent years trapped inside, so long that it seemed to shrink with each passing day, until the walls were pressing in on him and all he wanted was escape. He never thought, once he left it, that he would return.

This is the second time that Jaskier is returning.

It would be poetic, he thinks mournfully, if somebody—one of the servants, perhaps—were to spot him, and run to fetch his family, so he might meet them at the gates.

No such thing happens, of course, because life isn’t a story.

Instead, Jaskier rides straight to the stables, Geralt but a half step behind him, and the horse’s hooves strike a discordant melody against the stone floor.

“Jaskier?” he hears somebody say, as he’s inspecting the state of the place—cleanly swept, though there’s a saddle resting over one of the stable doors that Jaskier is itching to put away—and when he looks, his sister and his brother are standing, reins in hand, obviously having just come back from a ride.

“Marek,” he greets, “Hanna. It’s… good to see you again.”

They look at him as though they don’t believe he’s real. Next to him, Geralt urges Roach forward, so that she and Pegasus stand side-by-side, and their disbelieving gazes flick to him—flick to the witcher.

Jaskier smiles quietly. “Can we talk?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and ITS DONE
> 
> thank you guys so much for reading! this is a long one. thank you to the guys who ran the big bang--i LOVED every minute of it and also i stopped me from going insane during quarantine and so. yeah. thanks. thank you to my artist, SDS, links at the beginning, and my beta (hannah, you're the light of my life)! couldn't have done it without you both. leave a kudos and maybe tell me what you thought?
> 
> [I also have a tumblr](https://redkelpie.tumblr.com/)


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